President Obama “may have” just called George Zimmerman a racist.
“If a white male teen would have been involved in this scenario,” he said, “both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.”
Is Obama saying that had Trayvon Martin been a white male teen, he would not have attacked Zimmerman? Or is it that if Zimmerman had seen that Martin was white, he would have been OK with the teen attacking him? For the president of the United States to make such implications with his fake, gentle nonchalance, is despicable on many levels. It would also contradict the FBI who cleared Zimmerman of a race crime and determined he is not a racist.
Why did Obama bring race up at all? Did he mean that the jury who decided Zimmerman’s innocence was racist? All six of them?
Obama’s statement also opposes the claims that none of the buildup of the case had anything to do with race. (Is it a coincidence that the people protesting the verdict were predominantly black?) He himself called attention to the race issue more than once: “If I had a son he would look like Trayvon Martin.” “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”
Obama is correct in saying that if Martin had been a white male teen, the outcome would have been different. We would never have heard of George Zimmerman, this shooting, or the trial at all if Trayvon Martin had been white. Or maybe we would have. And the Zimmerman would have been the victim.
The aftermath would have been different had the media not chosen this particular court case to sensationalize. Why did the Zimmerman Trial make national headlines for weeks and weeks? Why is Zimmerman the target? He’s as white as Obama is. What about all the shootings in Chicago? Is black-on-black crime not as heinous as Hispanic-mix on black? Police responded to more than 40 shooting victims in about 72 hours in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend. “It’s young men committing these crimes,” Gawker reported, “and the vast majority of those young men are black (though blacks make up only 33 percent of Chicago’s population, they’re 78 percent of the murder victims).”
We don’t hear daily news reports about the carnage in the “deadliest global city.” There aren’t protest rallies about it. Our news outlets don’t have 24/7 coverage of the trials that may or may not result from these murders. And our president doesn’t make impromptu speeches about them.
Zimmerman was proven innocent, but he’s treated as a criminal either way. The Justice Department won’t let him have his gun back. What do they think he’s going to do with it? Go out and shoot someone, because it was such a picnic for him the first time? You’re innocent until proven guilty, and when proven innocent, you go back to enjoying the rights you had before. Zimmerman’s life will never be the same again, but he is entitled to his material possessions.
