This racist.

Marc Anthony sang God Bless America at the baseball All Star game earlier this week.  What followed was a bunch of racist assholes complaining about having a Mexican singing God Bless America.  Here’s the thing.  Marc Anthony is an American citizen.  People just assumed that he wasn’t because of the color of his skin.  So they’re not just racist assholes, they’re clueless racist assholes. The saddest thing is some of them were called on the fact that Marc Anthony was American and some just doubled down and said that he didn’t look American.  That means he wasn’t white.

Anytime you hear anyone talking about Real America, you can be assured that they’re pining for the days when only white people had rights.  Real America is a dog whistle cry to all the racists out there.  And they respond to it in droves.

In other news, people still watch the All Star Game.  Who knew?

Imagine you’re walking home from the store after picking up some snacks.  You notice a man following you in his car.  You go and cut through the yard where a car can’t go and the man gets out of his car and starts following you through the yard.  You’re talking to someone on the phone and telling them that this creepy guy is following you.  It’s really starting to freak you out.  What does this man intend to do to you?  Luckily, this is Florida so you turn around and confront the man who may intend to do you severe physical harm.  The man continues to approach so you stand your ground and attack the man.  The man pulls a gun but you bash his head against the sidewalk killing him before he can use it.

The above is a scenario that follows Florida’s stand your ground law and fits all of the facts presented in the case with the exception of who ends up dead at the end.  If it happened like this, do you think Trayvon Martin would not have been arrested immediately?  Do you think Trayvon Martin would not have been charged with murder soon after?  Do you think Trayvon Martin would have been found not guilty of murder?  How about if he used a gun to kill Zimmerman instead?

The scales of justice are stacked against black men in particular and minorities in general in so many ways.  Injustices are thrown at them on an almost daily basis.  How could you not be angry if it were happening to you?  And yet we live in a world where white people threaten revolution because their imaginary freedoms are pretend being taken away and where minorities rioting over actual freedoms being taken away are looked upon as misguided at best and less than human at worst.  Ta-Nehisi Coates says it best:

It is painful to say this: Trayvon Martin is not a miscarriage of American justice, but American justice itself. This is not our system malfunctioning. It is our system working as intended. To expect our juries, our schools, our police to single-handedly correct for this, is to look at the final play in the final minute of the final quarter and wonder why we couldn’t come back from twenty-four down.

To paraphrase a great man: We are what our record says we are. How can we sensibly expect different?

Yes, George Zimmerman was acquitted of the killing of Trayvon Martin.  Yes, sadly, George Zimmerman should have been acquitted of the killing of Trayvon Martin given Florida’s ridiculous Stand Your Ground laws.  None of this gets around the fact that Trayvon Martin would be alive today if he were white.  George Zimmerman had black kids up to mischief on his mind when he followed Trayvon Martin.  All evidence points to this being true.

When I first heard about the call to pursue a Federal Civil Rights case against George Zimmerman, I balked at the idea.  There is no doubt in my mind that George Zimmerman is a soft racist, just like some of my family, just like some of my friends (and boy does it baffle me that they don’t realize they’re racist).  That, in and of itself, is not a good reason to pursue Federal charges.  The more I thought about it, though, the more it makes sense.

George Zimmerman is not your average soft racist.  He is a soft racist with a gun.  He used that gun to kill a black kid.  A black kid that he was following because he was black and “something’s wrong with him”.  This, despite the fact that he was told not to follow the black kid.  Why?  Because “these assholes always get away”.

George Zimmerman put himself into a position that allowed him to kill Trayvon Martin.  Florida law allows you to put yourself into a position to kill another human being.  The combination of the two led to Trayvon Martin’s death.  We have a racist man using a racist law to kill a black kid.  This seems to me to be exactly what Federal Civil Rights trials are meant for.

And I know it’s besides the point, but boy does George Zimmerman make it difficult for to like him or feel sorry for him even a little bit.  He thinks the killing of Trayvon Martin was “God’s plan”.  Defense attorneys were wise to keep him off the stand.  A sympathetic figure he is not.