Regarding intent vs. impact, accountability, and intersecting identities

So… wow. i knew when i posted something in an “open letter” type format — especially with social networking — there would be ripples, but i had no idea shit was gonna blow up the way it did, for myself or the Mrs. folks (and i know a lot of readers are probably saying “well no shit!” right now, but this has been a learning experience for me on multiple levels).

i wanted to take an opportunity to clarify where i was coming from and address some of the common comments and concerns that i’ve heard, both in person and a great deal on facebook and other blogs. so much of this seems to be related to the gulf that can exist between the intention behind an action or statement, and the impact it has on an individual or community.

i would like to start by addressing what i see as some conflation happening in a couple different areas with regard to my initial writing. there seems to be an underlying assumption that by publicly sharing an experience at Mrs. where i perceived trans-misogyny to be operating, i was trying to bash or otherwise take down Mrs. or the folks who run it. my intentions were far from that — as i tried to make clear in my concluding paragraph — but i nonetheless want to offer my apologies if my language contributed to this perception. i’ll touch more on this later.

another misunderstanding i would like to speak to is the equivocation of me saying that i had an interaction with some individuals where i perceived trans-misogyny to be operating, with me outright calling those individuals trans-misogynists. as jay smooth so eloquently reminded us a few years back, the “this is what i heard you say” conversation is very different from the “this is what i think you are” conversation. the latter is never something i intended to have –or would even feel qualified having. i don’t know these individuals; only our interaction and my experience of it. and i know that no matter what your identity is, who your friends are, or what you consciously believe in, we are all steeped in dominant culture, and as such, are all still capable of — intentionally or not — supporting and perpetuating oppressive systems, even those that target us. that doesn’t mean we’re bad people; it means we’re humans living under multiple, often intersecting oppressions and we’re all working on our own shit, and we’re all bound to fuck up sometimes.

in that vein, i would like to speak to the issue of my being a white queer who labeled a song by a queer person of color misogynistic. (as i learned this weekend just prior to the meeting on saturday, the song that was played was “Ima Read” by Zebra Katz –i believe a remix of it. i have since read up on the lyrics and their intended meaning, the context from which the song emerged, and interviews with the artist.) of course, since we don’t exist in a vacuum — but rather a white supremacist state — i approached the DJ in a culture where white people regularly asymmetrically level charges of sexism against music produced by artists of color while giving white artists a relative pass.

i would like to own my cultural ignorance on the Katz piece, and to extend my apologies to the DJ with whom i had that racially loaded interaction. i can see how a DJ of color who is trying to promote the work of other queer PoC being approached by a white person who immediately labels the song misogynistic — ignorant of its context — and says it’s something they don’t want to hear in that space could be is fucked up, and i can understand that individual’s dismissive attitude more. i’m not saying that i also didn’t still feel silenced in a gendered way based on his response to me –just that it seems both of us were having some real shit come up on the basis of our varied identities, and both are valid and worth unpacking.

and i want to make it clear to the folks who have a different relationship to traditionally misogynistic language and the Katz song, that i hear you. in that linked post, the author states that while i characterized hearing that song as a low point in my night, as a queer person of color in an overwhelmingly white space, hearing that song was a high point for them — the first time they were able to feel safe. and that shit’s real. and while personally, i am still triggered by hearing the repeated use of female slurs (whether by a mainstream white female pop singer or a black queer rapper), much of the feedback i have received regarding Katz and nearly everything i can find online about Ima Read has been enormously positive, and clearly it has particular significance among many queers of color. and that is not something i want to fuck with: had i known the context of Ima Read like i do now — while it doesn’t necessarily change my relationship to the language — it absolutely changes the way i view its presence in queer spaces and how i respond –or rather, how i wouldn’t have responded to the folks playing it.         

On queer spaces and misogyny: when “safe” spaces aren’t

[UPDATED 4/18/12: please see the follow up post]

sometimes when i’m out dancing, surrounded by queers i love and queers i don’t know, appreciating how so many folks around me are as much of a gender-fucking mess as i am, i forget that a “safe” space is never a guarantee. it is an ideal. a code of conduct that we hope people adhere to. it is, at root, a goal–not a proclamation. not a guarantee. sometimes, i think we forget this.

“Shut up queen! shut up queen! shut up! queen queen queen queen queen!” i can still hear that last part. it does this kind of echo-loop in my head sometimes where the word runs together, like a CD skipping right before the “en” sound. “Quee-quee-quee-quee-quee–.” If i wasn’t so appalled i might be impressed by their ability to repeat the same word so goddamned fast.

i’ve had bits and pieces written on this since it happened around mid february, but haven’t gotten around to organizing them into something coherent until now. And since I realized it’s still something i’m thinking quite a bit about, and something which influences my relationship to portland’s queer scene, I should get it out.

it was my birthday celebration and a group of friends and i had decided to go to Mrs. together, a monthly queer dance party at mississippi studios. watching blow pony slip further and further into mainstream gaydom (straight onlookers in welcome tow) left me wanting for more explicitly trans and genderqueer friendly spaces. while i had never been personally, Mrs. was repeatedly billed to me as just that, and it sounded great.

and here’s the thing: for the most part, it really was. the theme was “let’s get physical,” so there was plenty of brightly colored spandex, hot pants, swimsuits, you name it –and it all looked pretty fabulous. plus the absurd workout videos from the last four decades they were projecting behind the stage didn’t hurt. i even saw this one hipster in full 80s workout gear (sweatband and all) walking around with a walkman and headphones. such commitment! sidebar: are all party themes automatically retro now? is that just like, default?

Anyway, for the most part, the music was really enjoyable too. i remember one song — a sign of things to come, though we didn’t know it yet — that came on which made my friends and i stop our bodies to talk. i don’t even remember what song it was anymore, but the point it brought up was why, at queer dance parties, do we consistently listen–and dance–to super misogynistic music?? is it somehow ironic? is it okay because ‘hey, we’re all in the know and feminist and stuff, so we can just enjoy it?’ what, exactly, makes it okay?

White jesus! er, happy easter!

i’d thought i’d take this eater sunday opportunity to talk a little bit about the whitening of jesus christ. the above image on the left is what the best of modern forensic and anthropological science estimates a male born at the time and place of jesus of nazareth would look like, while the right-hand picture is of a 1940 painting by warner sallman which serves as a prime example of the thoroughly whitened image of jesus ubiquitous in the contemporary West. (wait, maybe he was murdered looking like the image on the left, but came back looking like the one on the right! case. fucking. cracked.)

certainly, many christians are not surprised by the news that the supposed son of god didn’t look anything like the image on the right, but nonetheless have no trouble looking to that image. because, as evidenced recently and quite visibly by the high profile killing of trayvon martin (among other less publicized killings), as well as the backlash against fictional characters of color, under white supremacy, non-whiteness cannot possibly be ascribed to the epitome of purity and goodness that is the popular image of jesus christ. as savior, as martyr, jesus must be white, because white is all that is good. white=light, after all, and light “drives out the darkness.”

all this, despite the fact that historically speaking, jesus could not possible have been “white” (or at least what we would call “white” today, since white as a racial categorization didn’t even exist til about 1650 years after jesus’ birth). white jesus simply defies logic. as hari kondabolu has put it, “two brown people cannot make a Swedish fucking tennis player… Any child or racist can tell you that.”

(go to 2:21 for white jesus specifically, though it’s all great.)

and while we’re on the subject of historical revisionism and christian fantasy, what the fuck do chocolate eggs and bunnies have to do with christ’s resurrection? eddie izzard offers his thoughts:

 

anyway. happy white(ned) savior resurrection day, dear reader.

‘The Walking Dead’ and the Real Diversity Problem On (Some) Ambitious Dramas

**it’s true, i’m a a little lot bit of a zombie fanatic, and i was originally gonna include my own post on the walking dead (twd) and race here, but i found this one to be as illuminating as anything i could say. anyway, twd/contemporary zombie mania and gender is its own post anyway, so maybe i’ll get to that myself in the future. in the meantime, here’s to a *hopefully* rad 3rd season of twd (and check out the original comics that inspired the series here).**

This is a cross-post from Televisual, by Aymar Jean Christian

UPDATE: The arrival of a new character signals a possible shift in season three.

It’s an old and uninteresting complaint: black characters on TV — and horror movies — get killed or written off too early. Clearly, that is what’s been happening on The Walking Dead with T-Dog. (For a good rant, head to Clutch).

I’m going to try to push the debate further, past “isn’t it a shame characters of color get short shrift.” The truth is the T-Dog Problem signals broader problems with The Walking Dead and some other prominent dramas. It’s a symptom of an ailment the writers might actually care to remedy, beyond appeasing black viewers.

First, the basics. Earlier this season T-Dog told Dale he was concerned about being black and a weak link in the group. This was an insightful moment from the writers, foregrounding the idea that being different after the apocalypse might be a problem — after all, in times of stress, people stick to their own — and an interesting meta-commentary on the fragility of being a black character on TV — T-Dog was a great candidate for a quick kill. Then T-Dog disappeared. I literally forgot all about him until last week, when he had one line that was almost comically interrupted. This week T-Dog was similarly marginal, leading Vulture‘s recapper to state: “By this point, the casual dismissal of one of two minority characters…on this show is feeling extremely suspect. The only thing saving it from being full on offensive is that the same treatment is being given to Hershel’s entire white family.”

The problem isn’t only about a tired debate over representation.

The real problem with T-Dog’s absence is it undermines the point of the whole show. Let me explain.         

intermission, part 3(blurred days)

hello internet. its been a while since we last just talked, ya know — without a specific topic or a title with a colon in it — so i thought it was time for another random-ass link parade post i’ve decided to call intermissions, for whatever reason. and besides, due to my insomnia or dsps or just poor choices or whatever the fuck, until yesterday, i was pretty much up for three days straight. (*okay full disclosure: i slept for like 5 hours after the first 42. still a new personal record.) anyway. thats given me time to look at a lot of messed up shit on the internet. and there’s a lot of it. and it’s kinda feelin like we’ve slipped back are stuck at about a half century ago, where black people are still being legally murdered and queer people are being overtly equated with pedophiles. and so, dear reader, i wanted to take this opportunity to share with you some of my findings in this more informal setting.

lets start with alaska, shall we?

ad transcript: “Carol runs a daycare center in anchorage. But if proposition 5 passes, it will be illegal for carol to refuse a job to a transvestite who wants to work with toddlers. If she hires him, she risks losing customers. And if she refuses, she can be fined or imprisoned. Anchorage is already a tolerant city. Vote no on Proposition 5.”

yup. because even the idea that a gender-variant person (especially one who is male-assigned) would want to work with children is shocking, threatening –even to this baby! poor, poor carol. what’s a transphobe to do these days??

it’s no surprise that the opponents of proposition 5, an ordinance to include gay, lesbian, and transgender people in anchorage’s already existing anti-discrimination law, chose to depict the most stereotyped, caricatured image of a male-assigned gender-variant person they could. in the ad, they refer to this person as a transvestite and accurately use male pronouns (presumably to emphasize the supposed incongruity and unnaturalness of the applicant’s appearance). it seems like the people behind the ad are well aware of the difference between a transvestite and a trans woman, but are counting on the public to conflate them both with this image. after all, both are male-assigned expressions of femininity, and everyone knows that’s just perverse. disgusting. who cares what the specifics are.

the ad doesn’t stop there. it more than just implies that trans women and cross-dressers are sexual predators just waiting to abuse children –with this image, it straight up says it. apparently, all we’re waiting for is to be given “special rights” and then it’s a green light for molestation. the whole campaign is eerily similar to this widely used video from 1961, warning boys of the “homosexual threat.” seriously, watch that shit.

the ad pulls out some fucked-up orwellian double-think to close its hate-mongering message. “anchorage is a already a tolerant city. vote no on proposition 5.” whew! check off that diversity box!

“Anchorage already tolerates black people and women! Isn’t that ENOUGH?” one anomalously coherent youtube commenter writes

while sadly, it appears that on tuesday, anchorage voters rejected prop 5, it also seems likely that some shady shit went down with the vote, and the aclu is demanding an independent review.

whipping up public sentiment against trans people (trans women, in particular — woo team trans-misogyny and heteropatriarchy!) based on the implication that we’re pedophiles is not isolated to alaska or the 1960s. in february, protesters of an anti-trans discrimination bill in baltimore county lined the streets of the their county councilor’s office, with at least one woman using her daughter to hold up a sign (clearly written by the child herself) reading, “Why won’t you protect me? KEEP THE MEN OUT OF MY BATHROOM.” that bill, thankfully, did pass — restroom protection intact.

transphobia is, of course, not relegated to our shores alone: did you know that 17 european countries force trans sterilization? niether did i, or a lot of people, apparently. from mother jones, “People rightly flipped out… over the news that Swedish parliament would not be repealing a barbaric law that forces sterilization on trans people seeking to change their gender on legal documents… Considering how shocking people find Sweden’s law, it’s worth pointing out the country is 1 of 17 in Europe (shown in red below) that require trans people to have a surgical procedure that results in sterilization before legal gender change is made to their identification…”

oh, joy.

back in the states, the GOP circus continues, with the again inevitable nominee romney coming under fire for his unfortunate — and substantial — financial ties to the National Organization for Marriage (you can guess what they do), after confidential documents were made public by a federal court investigating NOM’s activities in maine. the 2008 internal documents detail NOM’s divide-and-conquer strategy for getting california’s infamous gay marriage-banning prop 8 passed, stating, “The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks — two key democratic constituencies.” it is being speculated — and with good reason — that as a high-value donor to NOM, romney was aware of the organizations blatantly fucked up tactics.

meanwhile, last holdout santorum –i’m not even counting gingrich anymore–almost forgets to filter.

One more reason not to go see the lorax movie emerges, as the film attempts to reach unprecedented levels of irony by commercially partnering with monsanto (fucking monsanto!), in addition to over 70 other promotional partnerships — which is why shit like this now appears in our sidebars.

what else we got? oh yeah… dharun ravi, the college student who secretly broadcast his roommate, tyler clementi, kissing another man. clementi soon jumped to his death from the george washington bridge. last month, ravi was found guilty on 15 charges ranging from invasion of privacy to tampering with evidence, and sentenced to ten years in prison. ten years. i’m all for decrying homophobia, but what the fuck good is locking up this kid for a decade gonna do?

“I can’t justify Ravi’s decision to invade his roommate’s privacy, especially not at a moment in which he would be extremely vulnerable. I also cannot justify Ravi’s decision to mess with evidence, even though I suspect he did so out of fear. But I also don’t think that either of these actions deserve 10 years of jail time or deportation (two of the options given to the judge). I don’t think that’s justice…

I’m also sick and tired of people saying that this will teach kids an important lesson. Simply put, it won’t. No teen that I know identifies their punking and pranking of their friends and classmates as bullying, let alone bias intimidation. Sending Ravi to jail will do nothing to end bullying. Yet, it lets people feel like it will and that makes me really sad. There’s a lot to be done in this realm and this does nothing to help those who are suffering every day.”
–danah boyd, quoted on racilicious

one last important read: i know we’ve all probably read a lot — or written some ourselves — on trayvon martin, but this little post by Aurin Squire is a must. the author reflects on what happened to martin and his own experience Walking While Black, and manages to say so much with such economy of words. i really like this piece.

of course there is more. there is always more. more thoughts on the hunger games and its “unisex” appeal, katniss’ general badassery and a mainstream film with a female lead breaking pre-sale records in addition to a $155 million opening weekend, not to mention how sick i am of fucking love triangles in YA fiction (did Collins think it wouldn’t work without a bit of twi-puke thrown in? umm but seriously, TEAM GALE!). but after all the depressing shit, and enough talk on HG already, i want to leave you with this: gay dolphins. seriously. not only are they fuckin smart but they’re also hella gay. that link also features a slide show of other examples of queerness in the animal world, all fantastic.

and that about does it for me right now. i gotta go get back to not meeting my body’s basic need for sleep and other unhealthy patterns. or something. good talk, internet.

the hunger games continued: leftovers edition

so i can’t tell if my title is punny or not, but the point is that i got more shit to say that didn’t seem to fit with the content of first post… so….take two:

cinna and katniss embrace before the games begin

Full disclosure: i devoured the books – read all three last summer (loved the first two, meh on the third), and i had super low expectations going to see the movie last week. but then i came out… surprisingly impressed. [**assumed familiarity with the story/spoiler alerts still stand**]

i wasn’t particularly impressed with the whitewashing of katniss and district 12, as i discussed earlier, though i was quite fond of some of the casting choices. Kravitz as cinna worked really well for me — as did Donald Southerland as the understated president snow — and i’m excited to see more interaction between them and katniss in the upcoming films. in fact, the acting was pretty solid all around. (well, peeta was a bit wooden but his character was consistently overshadowed by lawrence and Woody Harrelson, so it didn’t matter much.) in fact, harrelson’s haymitch ended up being another highlight. though he wasn’t as overtly cruel to katniss as he was in the book, their banter was still heated and engaging, and harrelson — even as a sexist, condescending alcoholic — remained entertaining and strangely likeable (much like the haymitch of the books).

harrelson’s surprisingly cunning drunk

as for my qualms with the movie visa vi the book, they are mostly relegated to the portrayal of district 12, hunger, and the day to day of living under military (police?) occupation. life in district 12, like most of the others, is fucking hard. you’re under constant electronic and human surveillance. a (sporadically working) electric fence keeps you in the district, and you are forbidden from entering the woods beyond the fence, especially for hunting. it even carries a potentially lethal sentence. and still katniss and gale must do this regularly, knowing it’s the only way to keep their families fed. and yet, none of this sense of pressure is communicated through the film. that sense of all encompassing oppression (especially within the walls of district 12) that was so present in the books was lost — unnecessarily, i think — in its translation to film.

additionally, for taking place in a society built around the idea of food scarcity (or at least, manufactured scarcity), there was very little in the film for us to actually see the need or the hunger of the citizens of district 12. no constant talk of where the next meal will come from, or how it will be payed for, or how to sell the illegally caught game at the Hob without alerting the peacekeepers. many of the people in 12 appeared dirty, but not particularly skinny or malnourished. and after their lifetime of hunger, when katniss and peeta finally arrive at the capitol, there is maybe one (brief) scene of them eating the lavish food put before them — not the exciting, wide-eyed feasts of lamb stew (where was that lamb stew?!) and the other delicacies that katniss and peeta wolf down greedily in the book. (a concise analysis of the major differences between the book and the film can be found here.)

one of the biggest alterations comes in what we see in the aftermath of rue’s death. katniss mourns the same way in print and film — wreathing rue in flowers, though in the book she knows there’s no chance in hell it will be nationally broadcast; it’s a personal gesture to rue and a personal “fuck you” to the gamemakers and snow. district 11 did, however, learn of rue and katniss’  partnership –friendship, even, and sent katniss a loaf of bread in the arena as thanks. later, we learn that rue’s death and katniss’ actions do lead to a revolt in D11, but we’re never shown it. in the film, the gamemakers actually do broadcast katniss adorning rue with flowers, and this immediately leads to a violent uprising in district 11, pitting the majority-black district citizens against the peacekeepers.

and here’s where i’m conflicted. i thought it was a well done, potentially even moving scene of the marginalized suddenly rising up against state oppression. on the other hand, it was the *only* riot scene in the film, and all i kept thinking was do we really need to further popularize images of black people rioting?? especially when it’s one of the only — and certainly the longest — scene where we even see more than a handful of black folks in the same shot. i can’t help but wonder how the longstanding white fear of black gatherings and collective anger affected the creation of this sequence…or the decision to show this district uprising rather than another (like 8, for instance, which i believe also rebels around the same time)… In and of itself i’m not sure this would have stood out, but given how few faces of color we see anywhere else in the film, i find it interesting to note which aspects of Collin’s fantasy world were whitewashed and which were allowed to retain their melanin.

anyway, the camera work had its own problems, though it at least kept things moving along at a brisk enough pace (sometimes too much so) and seemed to include more shots of blurred light and trees than the blair witch project. because this is what has to happen when you make a fucking family film about 24 children murdering each other on reality tv to keep an oppressed population docile. You get lots of screams and quick shots of forest and sky. IF you want that pg-13 rating, IF you want to get the whole family in for that slaughter-fest, then you can’t actually show the brutality of it, even if its in the books. even if the visibility of the brutality serves a significant thematic purpose, raising questions around culture-wide voyeurism, consumption, and sadism. well, i guess those things could stand to be lost in order to get that kid dollar, that family dollar. after all, as david edelstein says in vulture, “The murders onscreen are quick… The cutting is so fast that you can hardly see what’s happening, which has already won Ross praise for his restraint, his tastefulness. Tasteful child-killing!”

Tasteful child killing.

lets just sit with that for a minute, shall we? sit with it in the context of the social critique Collins provides through the hunger games. sit with it in the context of our world, of our media. of us watching this movie.

at base, the hunger games is a social critique of our voyeuristic, schadenfreude-driven, borderline sadistic culture, obsessed with “reality” tv, celebrity status, and sensationalistic news, steadily being desensitized to human tragedy through visual media. and now we can actually consume the visual representation of this written critique of our own love of voyeuristic violence –which is itself, by virtue of its source material and hollywoodization, violent and sensationalized. and we’re praising it for its portrayal of “tasteful child killing.” tasteful child killing – what kind of oxymoronic joke is that? with the movie, we are encouraged to visually consume this tasteful barbarity wrapped in a narrative ostensibly intended to indict what itself seeks to provide — visual entertainment through violence and human suffering.

there’s definitely some super meta, fucked up levels of irony operating here, but i can’t quite wrap my mind around them right now. goddamn, i’ll have to come back to this… postmodern irony-loving film students, have at it! oh, where’s abed when you need him…

welcome to post racial america, pt 2: the hunger games and the value of black life

<<spoilers ahead, and i’m not summarizin so wiki that shit>>

I’m really not sure where to start with all this… it’s all such a shit show! i’ll save all my nerdy thoughts on the book translation and more technical aspects of the movie for a later post so as to first focus on the shitshow that is racist fandom…

this was one of the first character posters for the Suzanne Collins book-turned-movie The Hunger Games released last november – the first widely available shots of the actors in their roles. Lenny Kravitz plays cinna – and is definitely one of my favorite parts of both the book and movie, while Amandla Stenberg is brilliant as the cherubic, tree-jumping rue. the character posters came out about 5 months ago and these are some of the responses they recieved. from t(w)eens. a whole fuck-ton of em actually.

right, right... because obviously a black man can't be "sweet and loving," (or even "simple and lovable looking"), let alone have a "calm temper" or a "quiet personality." #areyoufuckingshittingme??

umm i got the impression yall just pictured cinna as white either cause you wanted to or because under white supremacy, white's the default for a racially-unspecified person and you just didn't think about it. can you...really not get over it?

the funny thing is, cinna’s race is never mentioned in the book. Collins’ gives us some of his wardrobe choices and the fact that he has green eyes and always wears gold eyeliner. that’s pretty much it. but everyone is falling over themselves because the gay (i read him as such, anyway), white protagonist they’ve been rooting for is suddenly – gasp! – black. which of course means he’s physically incapable of embodying all of that calm, reassuring, sweetness stuff that their fantasized white cinnas did. uhg.

but wait, there’s more: we haven’t even got to rue yet… and this was a character who was explicitly described in the books as having very dark skin. more than once.  but lo, the movie opens, and with it, the floodgates of barely latent t(w)een racism.               

welcome to post racial america: on trayvon martin and legalized lynching

hi internet! its been awhile… i’ve been off in my own little world for a bit, but that damned senior project is long since up and now i need to write again. and theres certainly no dearth of massively fucked up shit happening right now….

by now, the story of trayvon martin is in the national spotlight. The 17 year old black kid was unarmed, carrying nothing but a bag of skittles and an iced tea, walking to his stepmother’s house in a suburban neighborhood of sanford, FL, when he was shot and killed. the shooter was a neighborhood watchmen named george zimmerman, a latino man nearly 100lbs larger than trayvon and armed with a handgun. zimmerman has a well documented history of racial profiling and is a frequent caller to the police — 46 times since jan 1, 2011 — often reporting young, black men. since of course being black and wearing a hoodie is a crime waiting to happen, zimmerman deemed trayvon a threat and decided to tail him. he even called the police to report trayvon for “looking suspicious,” (becuase he was “wearing a hoodie and walking slowly in the rain”). the dispatcher told zimmerman to wait in his car and leave martin alone. during the call, zimmerman reportedly muttered “they always get away,” and “fucking coons” – later changed to “fucking goons.” the details remain unclear and suspect, and eyewitness testimony has been changing/getting changed. what is clear is that at some point, zimmerman, disobeying the dispatcher’s orders, continued to follow trayvon on foot until he approached him and forced a confrontation. orginial eyewitness statements say they hear trayvon screaming for help, though the police insist it was actually zimmerman. the shooter claimed self-defense under florida’s “stand your ground law,” scary ass legislation which gives people the right to use lethal force to protect themselves outside of their home if they feel sufficiently threatened, even when the option to safely retreat is available. (that link has an excellent map for seeing which states have such laws in place). as of yet, zimmerman has yet to be charged with anything, police citing “lack of evidence.”

“Apparently an unarmed, dead Black teen is not evidence enough.  If this were 1912 and not 2012, we would call a Black man killed by a one-man firing squad with no just cause what it is: a lynching. These days, we search for euphemisms. Self-defense. That feels so inadequate…

What is this peculiar thing about whiteness that it makes criminals look like victims and victims look like criminals? Trayvon’s skin, not his actions, not his character, made him a criminal. Blackness always looks suspicious. Whiteness always looks safe…

In 1857, Justice Roger Taney infamously declared in the Dred Scott case that “a Black man had no rights that a white man was bound to respect.” In this post- most-racial moment, we must seriously re-evaluate this narrative of linear historical progress that we are beholden to. No, Black men don’t routinely find themselves hanging from trees. But that might be less an evidence of progress and more an evidence of white racial adaptation.”       -CFC  (emphasis mine)

the murder of trayvon martin has sparked national outrage. from stupid hoaxes to professional sport players showing solidarity, to marches planned accross the nation. even president obama briefly weighed in, stating “if i had a son, he’d look like trayvon.” of course, being obama he couldn’t say anything definitive or godforbid mention race directly (this is an election year after all), but by saying what he did about the looks of his own hypothetical son, the president implied he knew damn well this was a racist killing.

and how has the media responded? at first, it was surprisingly positive. major networks rallied around this tragedy, amplified community voices for zimmerman’s prosecution, and opened up a space for speaking about racial profiling and the different value society assigns to black and brown lives.

and then the racist right woke up, and found it had computers, and the campaign to smear trayvon as a truant-prone drug using aspiring thug that somehow deserved to be murdered was off and running. white supremacists hacked trayvons email and social networking identities as part of this effort, widely trumpeting that trayvon was suspended from school, caught with “marijuana residue” and once wrote “WTF” on a school wall (scandalous! its almost like he was in high school or something!). oh, and there was a facebook photo of the wrong trayvon martin circulating, in addition to one of the trayvon martin zimmerman murdered, showing him smiling into the camera with a gold grill in his mouth, presumably disseminated to make sure everyone at home knows just how threatening this “Gangsta” really was.

because all of that really matters. because even if trayvon was the drug addicted high school dropout gang member fill-in-your-favorite stereotype of deviant black youth the racist right would have you believe, it doesn’t even come close to justifying a cold blooded murder (what would??).

and this is about more than just trayvon — hes the face of this right now, and thats not accidental. martin, in his death anyway, is lucky enough to have an image that people are willing to rally behind. not everyone does, and they’re still getting killed. this is about more than racist killings, even, but about what it means to live in a society where some are deemed “normal” “insiders” and “safe,” while others are deemed just that – Other, foreign, different. and when different can so often mean threatening, and in 22 states, “threatening” can get you shot, this raises serious issues not only for black folks and PoC in general, but for trans and other gender nonconforming people as well.

for trayvon, oscar grant, sean bell, and the many other young black men –boys, many of them — executed by our white supremacist state or its self styled vigilantes like zimmerman, all it took was their skin color. (funny how we are so quick to ascribe adulthood to black folks; were a white 17 year old the victim of a horrific murder, the media would almost certainly refer to him as a “boy.”) their murders need only to be followed up by racist smear campaigns and blame-the-victim fox news segments, and the new narrative is all too perfect. Geraldo declares, “I think the hoodie was as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was.” for. fucking. serious. the victim-blaming language used here – as others have pointed out – is frighteningly reminiscent of the messages our culture sends to survivors of sexual assault — “YOU made the wrong clothing choices, YOU were in the wrong place. you were asking for it.” also Geraldo, not that any of your points are valid, but c’mon, at least get your facts straight. “wear hoodies only when its raining!” he says at the end of the clip. newsflash, mr. newsman — IT WAS FUCKING RAINING THE NIGHT TRAYVON WAS KILLED.

theres no good way to end talking about the racially motivated murder of a teenager. and i don’t know that there should be. but since i cant bring myself to actually embed fox’s nauseating clip here (its hyperlinked above), i’ll let this sum up geraldo/the right’s fucked up framing: