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Utterly bizarre, yet somehow unsurprising.
George Zimmerman, the self-proclaimed neighborhood watch leader who shot Trayvon Martin, has made his first public comments since the killing, on a website he’s created “to provide an avenue to thank my supporters personally” and solicit funds for legal and living expenses.
One page of that website is a photo album “dedicated to persons whom have displayed their support of Justice for all.” At the time of this writing, the album has just two pictures in it — an image of a poster reading “Justice for Zimmerman” and one of the words “Long Live Zimmerman” spray-painted in white on a red brick wall.
That’s right. George Zimmerman, the guy who once called the cops on a group of kids popping wheelies, is now thanking supporters for vandalizing a building on his behalf.
And it’s not just any building, as it turns out. This particular pro-Zimmerman graffiti was scrawled on the side of Ohio State University’s black cultural center last week, in an incident that the university’s president denounced as racially motivated.
Not long ago, Zimmerman’s defenders leaped to condemn Trayvon Martin over allegations that he once drew on a school locker. It’ll be interesting to see what — if anything — they have to say about Zimmerman’s public embrace of vandalism.
Update | As the blog Plunderbund notes, the “Long Live Zimmerman” graffiti went up on the night of April 4, the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination.
At least three young people were treated at a local hospital Thursday when a police officer working the hallways at Jack Robey Junior High School in Pine Bluff Arkansas pepper-sprayed a group of students returning from lunch.
School superintendent Jerry Payne told the Associated Press that the officer used the spray because, in AP’s paraphrase, “students weren’t getting to class quickly enough.”
One mother, a volunteer at the school, says her daughter’s face swelled up as a result of a severe allergic reaction to the spray, requiring her to be hospitalized for several hours.
The Pine Bluff Police Department has issued no statement on the incident, which took place four days ago. A local television station has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the officer’s Use of Force Report.
Like this:
The Breitbart machine’s attempt to smear President Obama for his 1990 embrace of civil rights activist and legal theorist Derrick Bell is an act of cynical, craven maliciousness. There was nothing covert about Obama’s support for Bell, nothing hidden about a video clip that appeared on television during the 2008 campaign and has remained online ever since. It’s a ginned up non-story grounded in a long list of lies and distortions.
Which is a shame not least because Bell is a figure around whom real, important arguments could easily be built. A civil rights lawyer who grew skeptical of the Brown vs. Board of Ed decision, a Harvard Law professor who wrote an agitprop sci-fi story that was adapted into a schlocky HBO production, Bell was a strange and complicated man. His views on race and justice were contrarian, pessimistic, and deeply unsettling to those — of any race — who regard the project of achieving American racial equality as having entered its mopping-up phase.
I’ve been going back and reading (often re-reading) some of Bell’s writings since this story broke yesterday, and I’ve been struck again and again by his ability to provoke and to unsettle. Take for instance his characterization, from a 1998 book review, of black people as living “at the mercy of a criminal justice system that unapologetically prefers and protects whites.”
It’s the “unapologetically” that inflicts the real pain there — a defiant, hostile characterization that seems designed to provoke defensiveness and dismissal. But the word is crucial to his larger argument, because it characterizes our society as one in which racism is not vestigial but essential. Racism, to Bell, wasn’t peripheral to American identity, but ingrained deeply within it, and if one did not acknowledge that reality, one’s efforts to combat it were bound to fail, and fail in shoddy, pathetic ways.
Bell’s critics often accused him of proceeding by assertion rather than argumentation, and there’s merit to that complaint. The “unapologetically” in that sentence is offered as a fact, not a hypothesis, and the casualness with which it is deployed renders it difficult to respond to. How would one prove that Bell was wrong? By offering examples of white American racial apology? By pointing to instances of liberal hand-wringing over racial abuses? Any attempt to engage seems to lead to entanglement, and Bell has no interest in finding a congenial middle ground.
But what he’s up to is something far more interesting than mere assertion, even in the parables that have drawn so much mockery. (Evidence of their confounding power can be found in the fact that they reduced a scholar as cogent as Richard Posner to the ugly and spluttering claim that they “reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of nonwhites.”) No, the project Bell is engaged in is the construction of an alternate reality, a brick-by-brick dismantling of received notions of how things are, to be replaced with a new way of seeing. Facts are important to this project, but Bell is mostly uninterested in arguing over facts — he proceeds from the premise that the facts are undisputed, and that it’s the interpretation of those facts that’s at issue.
Take this, from the piece I quoted above. Addressing the question of whether it is “proper to use a person’s race as a proxy for an increased likelihood of criminal misconduct,” Bell notes that from the dawn of slavery to the days of Korematsu, “the law’s answer was clearly, yes.”
He goes on:
“Affirmative action is under tremendous pressure politically and legally because whites claim they are innocent victims of policies that penalize them for the misconduct of others who also happen to be white. As a result, the Supreme Court has severely limited those programs by requiring that they meet the exacting standards of strict scrutiny. But the Court has approved race-based police stops with barely a mention of the harm suffered by innocent blacks or Mexican-Americans who look like suspects who also happen to be black or Latino. This inconsistency is not an aberration but part of a long-standing pattern to shape legal standards to protect whites when such protection can be achieved at the expense of blacks.”
“This inconsistency is not an aberration.” That phrase, that idea, constitutes the heart of Derrick Bell’s analysis of race and law in the United States.
As I noted last month, only one of the dozens of police officers involved in the notorious November 18 UC Davis pepper-spray incident has yet been publicly identified. Now a police demand for continued anonymity has delayed today’s intended release of the university’s report on the incident.
Attorneys for the officers claim that because the report includes “confidential peace officer matters such as the name of the peace officers and some sort of description of wrongdoing,” its release would violate state law.
The report, originally slated for a December release, has already been delayed multiple times. The most recent stumbling block came in response to a police union request for redaction of information about individual officers. A judge has scheduled a March 16 hearing on the issue.
The authors of the report have compromised with police before, but it seems like their patience may be wearing thin.
Retired California supreme court justice Cruz Reynoso, the chair of the commission, said in a statement that he was “very frustrated” by the delay, and remains committed to releasing “the complete and unredacted work of the task force.”
UC president Mark Yudof, who has presided over multiple incidents of police violence against non-violent student protesters over the last three years, took a similarly aggressive posture. He has, he said, “asked the UC General Counsel’s office to do everything in its power in court to turn back this attempt to stifle these reports” to ensure “a fully transparent and unexpurgated accounting of the incidents in question.”
In a separate statement, UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi said “the campus’s own internal affairs investigation into complaints of officer misconduct, which would be the basis for any personnel actions concerning the accused officers,” was “near completion.”
A mere 12 hours before it was due to be released online, the official UC Davis report on last November’s pepper-spray incident has been pulled indefinitely as a result of threatened legal action by the UCD police department.
The report, commissioned by UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi in November and originally slated for a December release, had already been delayed multiple times. Police had previously refused to allow investigators access to Davis police chief Annette Spicuzza or either of the two officers who sprayed the activists.
According to the Associated Press, “the officers involved in the Nov. 18 incident where 10 protesters were pepper-sprayed don’t want their names and confidential information they told investigators” released, and planed a morning filing for a Temporary Restraining Order.
Former California Supreme Court Associate Justice Cruz Reynoso, head of the investigating committee, said that the report’s release was being delayed on the advice of university lawyers. He added, however, that he remained “undeterred in my commitment to release the complete and unredacted work of the Task Force, a view shared by President Yudof.” Yudof himself said that “the entire UC Davis community deserves a fully transparent and unexpurgated accounting of the incidents in question,” and that he had “asked the UC General Counsel’s office to do everything in its power in court to turn back this attempt to stifle these reports.”
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