On Sunday, Bill Kristol, chronically incorrectsteward of his daddy’s magazine, dismissed liberals’ and black activists’ outraged response to the Trayvon Martin killing as “just demagoguery… mostly on the side of those who want to indict the whole society for this death.” The following day, Rush Limbaugh said the response was “doing more harm to the black community than anything else.” How blessed the black community must feel to have their best interests overseen by the living embodiment of everything wrong with white people.
If black people are upset about black people getting shot, they have only themselves to blame for their unwillingness to forget about it. And if they’re still so upset after so much time, they must have an agenda. After all, the victim was only a black boy.
Q&A with Aaron McGruder
Creator of “The Boondocks”
Our own Max Read posted a detailed breakdown of the white, conservative backlash against the Trayvon Martin coverage (and both Mediaite and Alex Pareene have added yet more). But what’s interesting about the unfolding conservative commentary is that Trayvon’s irrevocable silence re-defines ghoulish conservative blame-shifting. Trayvon is dead, and he can’t speak or act to drive the news cycle. The right must walk its disingenuous path alone—spurred on by habitual loathing that any black man, even a dead one, might cast light on their boundless twilight ethnocalypse.
I read the March 26 column the other day by Cherie Speller, an esteemed associate editor at the Reflector, about her family. It seems Speller, who is black, did not talk race with her family, who is also black, until she had an epiphany because of the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. She went on about how bad things either are or will be and she certainly did not mention the death of another child at about the same time at Mississippi State. The victim happened to be white; the killers were black.
Maybe it is me, but I feel more and more media folk make up the news rather than report it and it is going to have their slant when that happens. There’s no outrage at the race baiters — Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, et al. — hanging around to collect a few more dollars and hope for a revolution. As Speller stated in her piece, she seems more concerned with a teacher asking a black student to define Creole and read Langston Hughes — he’s good reading by the way — than stopping the black-on-black murders as in Chcago and elsewhere.
Conservative race-baiters set their clocks by the dog-whistle. They can’t dismiss Trayvon outright: blaming him explicitly because he is black goes nowhere. That would just shift the conversation onto the accuser. Nobody illustrated this principle better than former Reagan and Bush I strategist and Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater, in a kind of “Come to Jesus” moment shortly before his death (emphases mine):
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.” more at source
