Most Republicans insist that their judgments are color blind. True?

A recent AP poll found that 79% of registered Republicans expressed overtly racist beliefs. Of course if you believe that blacks actually are inferior, you won't believe you're PRE-judiced. You'll believe you're POST-judiced.

That is, if blacks really are inferior, a person who believes blacks are inferior isn't racist, and those who claim he is are just prejudiced against whites and/or "playing the race card."

I bring this up because I was just reading down the comment thread on the U.S News website about the 2nd Zimmerman juror who said he "Got away with murder."

If you skim down it a ways you'll see a lot more than the fact that nearly all who see themselves as conservative believe that George Zimmerman was totally justified in every single thing he did the night he shot Trayvon Martin dead. You'll see innumerable expressions of racist beliefs so hate-filled that I'd have thought I was on a Ku Klux Klan website.

These expressions were not needed to argue the facts of the case or how Florida's Stand Your Ground law exonerated Zimmerman. Or even simple self defense, though it should be obvious from the judge's instructions and the jurors' interviews that Stand Your Ground was integral to the case despite the defense team not citing it (because they knew the state of Florida would do it for them).

So these expressions were gratuitous expressions of hatred and contempt for blacks, not much different from what Southerners have been saying for hundreds of years in order to justify what they did to blacks.

Of course nobody said "I think blacks are inferior to whites." But..I don't even want to repeat what they said here. Just skim down the thread.

And after skimming down the thread, you should also understand why 95% of blacks vote Democrat.

Along with the vast majority of Americans who object to racism.

And you should also see why today's Republican Party is seen as primarily a regional party representing the Southern states along with their rural Midwestern and Southwestern satellites.

I was just reading a comment on another article--one in the NY Times--by a professional woman who with her husband moved to the Raleigh-Durham Research Triangle in North Carolina. Both had gotten great, well-paid jobs. They settled in and planned to make their careers there. But within a year or so the lady reported that they pulled up stakes and left the South despite the great jobs they had there, because both we so disgusted at the pervasive racism and misogyny.

Many Northerners just don't realize just how bad it is down there.

It seems more like Trayvon Martin was convicted of attempter murder, doesn't it?

Trayvon Martin’s posthumous conviction for assault with intent to kill, along with the letters here justifying that conviction, show the longevity of the South’s Myth of the Black Brute. Southern slaveholders created this myth to justify their abuse of blacks. After the Civil War they continued it to justify their virtual re-enslavement of blacks.

In the 1970s the GOP inherited it as part of Nixon’s Southern Strategy–only now it’s hidden in terms like "Urban Drug Gang" and "Chicago." Meanwhile America’s criminal "justice" system prosecutes and sentences blacks vastly out of proportion to whites arrested for similar crimes.

This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the huge number of jailed black men used to justify imprisoning even more black men (and then disenfranchising them).

In reality, poor uneducated blacks are about as likely to commit violent crimes as poor uneducated whites; ditto black doctors vs. white doctors. What drives violent crime is poverty, undereducation, police misbehavior, easy access to firearms...and being Southern. The South’s cult of violent "honor" stems from the brutal exigencies of slavery, living on in these Stand Your Ground laws.

"For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived, and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."


--John F. Kennedy

Zimmerman was not found "innocent."

This is a point the right wing Constitution-thumpers don't seem to get: the American criminal justice system, taking into account human fallibility and evidentiary problems, is designed to let many guilty people go free in order to ensure that no innocent people are proven guilty.

This is what "innocent until proven guilty" means.

So the jury may well have felt that Zimmerman was guilty--just not past "a reasonable doubt."
That's a heckuva long way from thinking he was innocent.

And there's the added problem of the "stand your ground" law, written up by the NRA and obediently put into the books in states controlled by the NRA's political arm, AKA the Republican Party. The "stand your ground" law makes it so difficult to convict anyone of murder that police departments hate it while criminal gangs love it.

So the jury may have obeyed Florida's "stand your ground" law's dictates while feeling that this law is bad law. In states that rule out citing "self defense" if you initiated the altercation, Zimmerman would have been found guilty of manslaughter. That's what juror B29 was trying to say, I believe.

George Zimmerman was not a Neighborhood Watch volunteer

The Neighborhood Watch movement was started formally in the US in the 1960s, and has spread to various other countries as well.

They vary, of course, but all have several key features in common:

1. People do not patrol alone. They ALWAYS go out at least in pairs, often more.
2. People do not carry offensive weapons. In some programs organized and trained up to 50 hours by local police forces, they may wear a kind of uniform and carry pepper spray. Most groups only carry phones.
3. People to not engage with people they find suspicious in any way--they phone the police. Period. They are trained to avoid contact. They are additional eyes and ears for the police. That's it.

George Zimerman patrolled alone, armed, and hunted his prey.

So by all three "prime directives" of all national and international neighborhood watch organizations, he was not a neighborhood watch volunteer, and such organizations are wringing their hands at the disrepute he's bringing up them.

George Zimmerman was a vigilante, and the mainstream press have proven once more that they aren't right wing or left wing--just lazy. If they were left wing--or speaking accurately--they'd call him a vigilante. They'd only call him a neighborhood watch volunteer if they were right wing--or lazy. Most journalists are registered Democrats, so you have to conclude that intellectually "lazy" best describes them.

Don't let people refer to Zimmerman as a "neighborhood watch volunteer." It's easy to explain why.

Also, I suspect that the special prosecutor threw the book at him because she found that was lying--starting with calling himself a neighborhood watch volunteer, following up by claiming that Trayvon hunted him down and attacked him, trying to kill him. In all likelihood the physical circumstances gave the lie to Zimmerman's alibi.

In addition, Trayvon had no history of violence; Zimmeman did.

True, in general prosecutors often over-charge people so they can plea bargain them into an easy conviction, running up the DA's record so he can run for governor on a getting tough on crime campaign. But not all do this, and not all do this all the time. Especially in a case that's being followed internationally. Most prosecutors don't want to do anything slimy when it's getting that much attention.

In all likelihood Zimmerman got lost in a fantasy where he's a heroic cop, and where people-who-look-like-crooks were to be driven off "his" turf. And black people "looked like" crooks just a bit more than others. Every police department knows about the wannabes in their territory. Many find work in private security, having failed to get into actual police forces. There's even a dark comedy about this: "Paul Bart, Mall Cop."

But when the Keystone Kops start shooting real bullets, the comedy disappears.

What's a racist?

Racism, as a political baseball bat, has been wildly misused by both sides. Lefties are way too quick to cry racism when the answer is more complicated and long before actual racism can actually be proven. But Righties are way to quick to get on their high horse about charges of racism, acting as if public opinion must conform to the strictest rules of a court of law, otherwise it's absolute proof that no racism was involved.

Even in a court of law, being acquitted is not the same as being proven innocent, just as being found guilty is, unfortunately, not always the same a being proven guilty.

Thus in the Zimmerman/Trayvon case, the fact that Zimmerman has black defenders doesn't prove that race didn't play into his motives. Racists often make exceptions for personal relationships.

And in fact I'm far less concerned with whether Zimmerman was racist or not as with whether the cops who tested Trayvon's body for drugs but not Zimmerman were racist. Or the police chief who closed a case that was hardly open and shut. And the police department that obliterated nearly all the evidence that would be required to prosecute Zimmerman.

As for refusing to arrest him--well, Zimmerman is apparently free to do as he pleases. He was previously arrested for domestic violence, resisting an officer without violence and than resisting an officer with violence (a felony). Yet mysteriously all three charges were dropped. BTW Zimmerman's father is a retired local judge who has loudly defended his son in this case, accusing all who call for his arrest as being full of racial hatred (against whites). 

My own guess is that Zimmerman might have followed a white or Hispanic teen in a hoodie in "his" neighborhood--but his numerous calls to the cops in the months preceding this incident, along with other details of his history, shows that Zimmerman is a type of person most cops recognize--the wannabe cop who gets carried away with his fantasy about being a cop, with a cop's importance and authority, when in fact he isn't one.

And whether Trayvon attacked the man who was following him with no authority (like a badge) to justify doing so is only relevant if you think Florida's "stand your ground" law doesn't apply to blacks. That law works both ways unless it's applied as a tool of racism. So either it isn't--and Trayvon was right to jump his stalker--or it is racist, in which case a very ugly reality of Southern culture is shown to have not suddenly disappeared in 1970 or thereabouts.

So I don't think Zimmerman was a down and out racist, but more likely a wannabe cop who was at least a bit racist (using racial profiling). Neighborhood watch people are suppose to watch--hence the name--and not to be armed. To call the cops, not to imitate cops.

I also think it's possible that Trayvon did jump him, which I'd disapprove of, but which does appear to be justified by these "stand your ground" laws that every police dept. I know of oppose strongly, and which thugs have been using to escape prosecution for murders. All so elderly, fearful, angry old Southern white men can feel more virile--if they could be honest with themselves and with the rest of us.