I’m convinced that white liberals and blacks care about the Zimmerman/Martin trial for entirely different reasons. For blacks, I think it’s largely anger at being profiled as criminals, while for white liberals it looks like the perfect opportunity to ban all guns! by making opponents of their agenda out to be vicious, racist killers. This is an angle of the debate that I haven’t seen anyone else explore, but I think it’s crucial to the media hoopla surrounding it.
I sympathize more with the blacks, not only because they are being more honest, but also because it is pretty lousy to be profiled, even if it’s essentially inevitable for young black men (even Jesse Jackson admitted to profiling young black men). Personally, I think the profiling problem could be largely solved if police and officials started paying attention to the Bill of Rights, and stopped carrying out unreasonable searches of black males, but more liberal-minded whites think the answer is rendering all Americans helpless so they can be better managed by a bureaucratic police state (that just so happens to employ many of them). The liberals don’t really have a problem with profiling; if they did they wouldn’t continue to vote for people like Bloomberg, who recently defended profiling, which the NYPD has practiced with gusto under his administration.
So, because Feministing has declared solidarity with Trayvon while supporting the continued profiling of all men as rapists, I thought someone ought to point out the hypocrisy here.
Here’s a question I’d ask these feminists::
How was George Zimmerman’s profiling of Trayvon Martin for being born black any more (or less) morally objectionable than profiling all men as rapists for being born male?
Is it that some profiling is OK, but other profiling is eeeevil? If so, what makes profiling men as rapists perfectly acceptable while profiling blacks as criminals is awful? You say because men are more likely to rape than women and rape is a problem? Well, blacks are statistically more likely to commit crimes, and crime is a problem, too.
You see, from a feminist standpoint, profiling blacks is wrong because it implies that all blacks are criminals, or prone to criminality. They do think in such simple terms, and their rape posters prove it definitively. They really think all men are prone to rape, and the less diplomatic of them will openly say so. In fact, some feminists have even declared every single act of heterosexual intercourse to be an act of rape. If they didn’t have this attitude, they certainly wouldn’t support posters against rape that offensively target all men.
I, and most of my readers, understand that while one group may have a higher rate of some particular problem, that doesn’t mean all or even most people in that group share it. Irish disproportionately drink too much, yet most Irishmen are not drunks. Chinese are disproportionately involved in counterfeiting, yet most Chinese are not selling fake goods. Muslims are more likely to commit religiously motivated violence, but the vast majority of Muslims do not do so.
Because of this understanding, we wouldn’t produce an ad campaign targeted at Muslims with the WTC disintegrating in the background of a poster that said “don’t be that Muslim.” That would a total dickhead thing to do.
And to put the Zimmerman/Martin debacle in context, George Zimmerman, when he profiled Trayvon and then took it a step farther by very rudely making him aware of it by tailing him, was being an asshole. What he did may have been legal, and it may have been within his rights, but he did provoke the kid. The reason Zimmerman was not – and shouldn’t have been – convicted of unlawful homicide is that Trayvon didn’t keep his cool, and he let his understandable indignation get the better of him, choosing to initiate a fight with Zimmerman*. In the cold eye of the law, his death was a result of that mistake: when someone is being an asshole it doesn’t give you the right to assault him; if you do, and cause him to fear for his life, it does give him the right to use deadly force in self-defense. It seems unfair, and it is, but the law must reflect the often brutal laws of nature. Trayvon didn’t deserve to die for his mistake, but neither does a kid who drives too fast too soon and fatally misjudges a turn. As Clint Eastwood said in Unforgiven, “deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
One might reason that if feminists have a problem with the verdict returned by the jury, then maybe they would understand if some man, angered by their poster campaign profiling men, beat the crap out of one of them. But that would be to assume that feminists are reasonable, morally consistent people, and they are not that. In fact, I can say with certainty that I, and most men reading this site, have far more sympathy for Trayvon Martin than a feminist would for a man who got shot and killed for attacking a woman who provoked him. I’d like to hear a feminist deny that!
*Men with guns do not start fistfights — the closer your adversary the less of an advantage a gun provides. This is why I’m fairly certain Trayvon started the fight. If Zimmerman intended to shoot him from the beginning he would have drawn his gun well before Trayvon was close enough to touch him, and if he anticipated a fight he would have done the same.
Source:
http://www.the-spearhead.com/2013/07/16/the-trayvon-martin-shooting-and-the-dont-be-that-guy-campaign/