Rude Pundit: The Niggering of Trayvon Martin

It's so much more than just blaming the victim.--SS     

(title unknown):


The Niggering of Trayvon Martin:

We see this again and again. A black male who captures the imagination of the nation must be degraded by the right. He must be turned into something else, some Other. President Obama can't simply be an educated black man from a lower middle-class background with whom they disagree ideologically. No, he's got to be an enemy, a foreigner, a nigger. It's hard to denigrate someone who might be like you, conservatives. But it's easy to attack a nigger because he's just a nigger. Or a coon.

When 17 year-old Trayvon Martin was shot dead, the process of transforming him from an average middle-class high school student to a dangerous thug who was asking for it began almost immediately (putting aside the profiling that George Zimmerman did the second he started stalking Martin around their gated community in his SUV). News reports say his body was tagged "John Doe" and held in the morgue for three days. Sorry, race apologists, but if that had been a white child, especially the white child of, say, a Tea Party member, there'd have been a fucking riot. Or, more likely, it just wouldn't have happened.

Now, the niggering of Martin is in full swing as fake photos, school records, Facebook postings, and even his tweets are put under the microscope. A police report that portrays Martin as the initiator of violence has been leaked. And the news media is going along with the victim-blaming that is being spun out by authorities and the right, allowing that it's in any way relevant that Martin was suspended from school once, for instance.

The niggering of Trayvon Martin works as every niggering does. It gives conservatives cover for their belief in the innate goodness of guns and the innate badness of anyone non-white who even dresses gangsta. It gives racists, open and closeted, a reason not to care. It allows them to see him as deserving of some punishment in general: if Zimmerman hadn't killed him, this narrative goes, well, fuck, chances are Martin would have been a criminal and better to get it over with now than pay for his incarceration.

The Rude Pundit read over Martin's "No_Limit_Nigga" Twitter postings, although he felt skeevy about it (and he's sure that Tucker Carlson didn't feel any skeevier than usual). It's pretty much a journey through retweets and responses and sexual shit that all fall into the category of "stupid shit teenagers say."

Then, on page 25, is this: "Retweet if your biggest fear is losing your Mom." Martin did so. Twice.

Yeah, reality is way more complicated. Or simple, really. If you take "nigger" out of the equation, you're left with "child."