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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.
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.
I wrote yesterday about the lawsuit filed by 19 UC Davis students and recent graduates who were subject to pepper spraying, other police violence, and false arrest last November 18. The students are suing fifty-six university employees for violating their constitutional and statutory rights, but the list of defendants only has six names on it.
Why? Because only one of the dozens of police officers who participated in the attack on the protesters has been identified by the university.
It’s more than three months after the incident. Video of the day’s events has been shown over and over again throughout the planet. But UC Davis still won’t tell its students which of its campus police officers brutalized them.
In addition to the pepper-spraying, which was conducted by two officers, the lawsuit alleges that one student was thrown to the ground where his head struck a lawn sprinkler fixture. Another was pinned down after having been pepper sprayed. Another was dragged, handcuffed, to a police car. Another was “slammed to the ground,” kneed, and kneeled on, then denied medical assistance.
None of the officers who engaged in these acts, other than the two who were videotaped pepper-spraying students without cause, have been suspended. As far as is publicly known, all are still at UC Davis, working alongside the sixteen plaintiffs who are still students there.
And yet the faculty of the university, in a 645-343 vote, praised Chancellor Katehi last week as “a Chancellor who engages in a full and open dialogue with students, staff, and faculty,” saying that her resignation “would have devastating effects on the moral and academic standing of the campus.”
“It is time,” say the UC Davis faculty, “to promote a constructive healing process.” When will these professors call for transparency and accountability for the campus police?
Imagine a father gives his teenaged daughter a lovely carved wooden box. Imagine she puts her diary in it, and letters she’s written to her friends, and letters they’ve written to her. Imagine she puts photos in it, and keepsakes, and mementoes. Imagine it’s where she keeps her camera, and her iPod.
Imagine he overhears her once with her friends, looking at stuff from the box, giggling. Reading diary entries aloud, sharing photos. Private things. Silly things. Imagine he sneaks into her room one day when she’s at school and breaks open the lock. Imagine he reads everything. Imagine he finds something that’s crudely, stupidly insulting to him.
Imagine he gathers everything up — the diary, the letters, the photos, the music, the trinkets. Imagine he makes a fire. Imagine he methodically burns it all. Imagine he presents her with the ashes.
Imagine he smiles as he does it.
Imagine he gloats.
How is that different from this?
studentactivism.net 
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