[News] What’s Really on Trial in George Zimmerman’s Case?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  What’s Really on Trial in George Zimmerman’s Case?

by Eric Mann <http://colorlines.com/archives/author/eric-mann>
http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/06/whats_really_on_trial_in_george_zimmermans_case.html 
<javascript:void(0)> 
<http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/06/whats_really_on_trial_in_george_zimmermans_case.html#commentsTop>

Monday, June 10 2013, 7:00 AM EST

Today, as we all enter into a likely media whirlwind surrounding the 
trial of Goerge Zimmerman, I’m turning over my Movement Notes space 
today to my long time friend Eric Mann. Eric is the founder of the 
Labor/Community Strategy Center and the architect of the Los Angeles Bus 
Riders Union. He has spent decades working on racial, gender and 
economic justice, and he’s applied his considerable intellect and 
outrage here to helping us all prepare for dealing with the predictable 
direction of the trial.

/—Rinku Sen/

+++

*Make Demands, Try the System *

George Zimmerman will go on trial today for the murder of Trayvon 
Martin. But let’s be clear, within the defense’s opening arguments, for 
many who follow the trial—which will be televised!—it will be Trayvon 
Martin who will be on trial.

He in fact already is. On May 23, the Orlando Sentinel offered the 
following news 
<http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2013-05-23/news/os-george-zimmerman-trial-trayvon-20130523_1_zimmerman-case-trayvon-martin-george-zimmerman>:


            New evidence in Zimmerman case: Trayvon texted about
            fighting, smoking marijuana about a week before he was killed.

    The evidence that George Zimmerman’s attorneys have uncovered on
    Trayvon Martin’s cell phone paints a troubling picture of the Miami
    Gardens teenager: He sent text messages about being a fighter,
    smoking marijuana and being ordered to move out of his home by his
    mother.

    And photos from that phone offer more of the same: healthy green
    plants—what appear to be marijuana—growing in pots and a .40-caliber
    Smith & Wesson handgun.

So here we go again with a script deep in the white American psyche: the 
impossibility of Black innocence.

My first experience with the horror of racism was the murder of Emmett 
Till in 1955; he was only a year older than me when he died. It was 
alleged that Till, a 14-year-old Chicago black boy visiting Mississippi 
for the summer, did not know his place and whistled at a white woman in 
a store. That evening the husband of the woman and his friend came to 
the house of Emmett’s grandfather, kidnapped Emmett, beat him beyond 
recognition, and then drowned his body. When his mutilated body was 
found, Emmett’s Mother, Mamie Till, insisted that his casket be left 
open because, in her words, “I wanted the world to see what they did to 
my baby.” The images shocked the black community and attracted great 
anger and sympathy from anti-racist people all over the world.

And yet, for some, the debate focused on whether Emmett had or hadn’t 
made any flirtatious advances toward a southern white woman—with many 
believing that if so, he had brought his murder on himself.

When I worked in the Newark Community Union Project in 1966-1968 in the 
city’s black south and central wards, we worked on many community issues 
including police brutality. In each case we worked to identify the facts 
of the story and document the specifics of the brutality. I 
still remember George Richardson, a militant black political figure 
explaining to us his views on the realities of police brutality cases as 
if it was yesterday. /You know, Eric, in these police brutality cases, 
we are always looking for the perfect black victim, the completely 
“innocent” black man, but he doesn’t exist. In our ideal case, a white 
cop beats or shoots a black man and it turns out it was a black doctor 
walking down the street doing absolutely nothing when a white cop comes 
up to him and beats him badly. But that is never the way it is. The guy 
usually is poor or working class, has a criminal record, he was 
drinking, he talked back to the cop, he ran a traffic sign, he 
shoplifted, he ‘resisted arrest’, he yelled at the cop, he raised his 
hand whether in self-defense or even to fight back. But that has nothing 
to do with the fact that he was beaten half to death for being black. In 
every case, the black man is on trial, guilty until proven innocent and 
you what, for most of these folks, even our hypothetical black doctor 
could never been innocent enough/. Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black 
manchild leaving a gated community and shot down in cold blood was as 
close in reality to that hypothetical black doctor as one can imagine, 
but it did not save him from an early grave.

So now, in this important test case, it’s essential that the civil 
rights movement and organizers in communities of color put the system on 
trial—for this trial is not about George Zimmerman alone, but also about 
how a system that sanctioned the murder of an un-armed black teenager 
until mass national and international pressure forced a trial. We have 
to win the argument that there are no extenuating circumstances in the 
stalking and murder of unarmed black men, and while we are there, we 
have to win the argument that a pen, or a knife, or a shopping cart, or 
a parked car or “something that looked like a gun” are not lethal 
weapons at 15 feet, and that lethal force is not an option.

Every time someone raises any questions about Trayvon, and we can be 
assured that as the trial goes on, the character assassination of 
Trayvon Martin will escalate, we have to counter with the most radical 
and structural demands on the system possible, to shift the therms of 
the debate and put the system on trial. This tactic—what’s been called 
“counter-hegemonic demand development”—was the great contribution of the 
civil rights movement and is rooted in Frederick Douglass’ advice: Power 
acceeds to nothing without a demand.

We have to roll back all the stop and frisk laws, all the “hold your 
ground laws,” all the “war on drugs” laws, the endless web of laws that 
have put one million black people in prison and millions more in 
probation and parole. We have to demand President Obama enforce the 1964 
Civil Rights Act and use his statutory power to withhold federal funds 
from any agency using those funds in a racially discriminatory 
manner—from Los Angeles to Chicago, from New York to Houston and 
everywhere else in between. We need to demand the social welfare state, 
not the police state—1,000 more buses, 1,000 more teachers, 1,000 more 
nurses, 1,000 fewer police. When we say Trayvon Martin did not die in 
vain, we have to fight for the maximum program that his life and his 
death and his innocence deserve.

/Eric Mann, a veteran of the Congress of Racial Equality, United Auto 
Workers and Students for a Democratic Society, and is the director of 
the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles. He is the host of 
KPFK’s Pacifica Voices from the Frontlines and the author of “Playbook 
for Progressives: 16 Qualities of the Successful Organizer.” He can be 
reached at eric at voicesfromfrontlines.com 
<mailto:eric at voicesfromfrontlines.com>./

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20130610/7bcc89d9/attachment.htm>