Monday, July 15, 2013

Django and the Zman

So I recently saw Django-the one where Jamie Foxx got to kill all the while people-and thought....Wow, they were very mean to black people in that era (duh), but the point was...it would not occur to me now that another human in our society would be treated so badly.  Our society is pretty color blind, most of the current "issues" are manifested by a small, vocal, portion of the population angry about a smaller segment of the population who still harbor dumb ideas.  These dumb people don't represent me and I am not responsible for them.

In the civil rights era, true injustice was addressed.  Its been almost 50 years.  As our President said, some act like nothing has changed. 

Does it not occur to the pseudo oppressed that they are being used?  Used as always for money and power?


Then there is the Zman and Trayvon.  That lesion is nothing about race and more about forgotten responsibilities.  Like acting like a responsible person, presenting yourself well, like the proverbial (as Mothers say) wearing clean underwear.

Trayvon had previously acted like a punk (gangsta), proudly I think...did he learn the life lesions of walk away from trouble, treat others (especially your elders) with respect, watch you language?...Do you think Trayvon knew these things?  Do you think a society where the a young man who acted like a gangsta would be corrected, counseled and told to shape up, would be a society where many break in's occurred and resulted in the need for neighborhood watchmen?  Do you think a man like Trayvon can be told to shape up?  What would be the response?  Positive or accusatory?

This was not about race, its about...

And no I was not there, I don't know if Zman was the bad guy, but consider the following from IBD:


The bias of Nelson, Florida Circuit Court judge and a lifelong Democrat, in favor of the prosecution and its efforts to railroad Zimmerman as a racist murderer has been palpable throughout the case. Her actions, which have actively aided the state, could poison jurors and factor into future litigation.
Her shameful rulings and behavior, therefore, are worth cataloging, and include:
• Suppressing exculpatory evidence recovered from the (double-password-protected) cell phone of Trayvon Martin that reveal deleted texts of the 17-year-old bragging about street-fighting with friends and relatives and photos showing him brandishing guns, gangsta-style. This evidence supports Zimmerman's claim he feared Martin and shot in self-defense.
• Disallowing Martin's criminal background, including arrests by Miami-Dade school district police for drugs, theft, graffiti and other delinquent behavior. (Martin, in fact, had been suspended from school the week he jumped Zimmerman inside his gated townhouse complex, after police found stolen jewelry and burglary tools inside his backpack.)



3 comments:

terry said...

Zimmerman was arrested for domestic abuse and assaulting a police officer however charges were dropped so the truth will never be known but both actors in this trajedy have baggage. My question to you Jim is when you see a white person walking down the street who is acting strange, looking like he he " up to no good" do you immediatly think of him as Jeffrey Dahmer, no of course not but most white folks have a fear of blacks ala Obama's grandmother who told him that. No law will change that perception but time and young people who are color blind. The simple truth is no matter who started the fight, deadly force should have been the last resort. How about pulling your gun out and pointing it at him and say stop and if he doesn't shoot in the leg. This wanna be cop, notice I didn't say race hater because I don't know, but he was getting his ass kicked and panicked. Stay in the car means stay in the car. Guilty of manslaughter for sure. It is an example of overcharging again by the state of Florida.

Jim G. said...

The jury's only job in the Zimmerman trial was to determine whether the defendant broke the law when he shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last year in a gated community near Orlando, Fla. In cases of self-defense, it doesn't matter who initiated the confrontation; whether Mr. Zimmerman singled out Martin because he was a black youngster in a neighborhood where there had been a series of burglaries by black youngsters; or whether Mr. Zimmerman disregarded what the police dispatcher told him before he got out of his car. Nor does it matter that Martin was unarmed and minding his own business when Mr. Zimmerman approached.

All that really mattered in that courtroom is whether Mr. Zimmerman reasonably believed that his life was in danger when he pulled the trigger. Critics of the verdict might not like the statutes that allowed for this outcome, but the proper response would not have been for the jury to ignore them and convict.

Did the perception of black criminality play a role in Martin's death? We may never know for certain, but we do know that those negative perceptions of young black men are rooted in hard data on who commits crimes. We also know that young black men will not change how they are perceived until they change how they behave.

The homicide rate claiming black victims today is seven times that of whites, and the George Zimmermans of the world are not the reason. Some 90% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks.

So let's have our discussions, even if the only one that really needs to occur is within the black community. Civil-rights leaders today choose to keep the focus on white racism instead of personal responsibility, but their predecessors knew better.

"Do you know that Negroes are 10 percent of the population of St. Louis and are responsible for 58% of its crimes? We've got to face that. And we've got to do something about our moral standards," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told a congregation in 1961. "We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too. We can't keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves."

Jim G. said...

George Zimmerman's acquittal of murder charges in a Florida court has been followed by predictable calls for America to have a "national conversation" about this or that aspect of the case. President Obama wants to talk about gun control. Civil-rights leaders want to talk about racial profiling. Others want to discuss how the American criminal justice system supposedly targets black men.

All of which is fine. Just don't expect these conversations to be especially illuminating or honest. Liberals in general, and the black left in particular, like the idea of talking about racial problems, but in practice they typically ignore the most relevant aspects of any such discussion.

Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. African-Americans constitute about 13% of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. The U.S. criminal-justice system, which currently is headed by one black man (Attorney General Eric Holder) who reports to another (President Obama), is a reflection of this reality, not its cause.

"High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination," wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice." "The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments."

The left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and "the system," but blacks have long been part of running that system. Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and '80s in cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia, under black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent cities in the U.S. today are run by blacks.