On the Murder of Trayvon Martin and the Outrageous Acquittal of His Killer:

THEY MUST NOT—THEY WILL NOT—GET AWAY WITH THIS!!!

Updated July 20, 2013 8 am | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

The whole country was rocked—and is rocking—over the outrageous acquittal of George Zimmerman.  This must be a watershed moment.  This must become the day that people look back on and say, “that’s when people began to see that you couldn’t reform this shit, and a whole different way—a revolution—was needed.”  But that will take STRUGGLE—struggle in the streets that must not be allowed to die down...and struggle against ways of thinking that will take us right back into the arms of the forces that have been carrying out crime after crime after crime... for hundreds of years. 

In thousands of ways, and from many different angles, people on the bottom and people of all strata and nationalities are being told to accept this verdict—or to rely on the very system of justice that rendered George Zimmerman not guilty to make fundamental changes.  People are being told that the only solution to a basic and foundational problem in this society is to once again turn for redress and justice to the very system that has produced and validated such atrocities. NO!  What needs to happen now is for the struggle to continue and advance. Society needs to roil with debate and anger. The new cracks in the cement that glues this society together need to be widened and deepened. The determined fury of people needs to bust through again and again. Thousands are rightly questioning what America is really all about. By standing up and challenging all the ways people have been taught to think about this, people can and must become ever more consciously part of the movement for revolution that is being built right now in this society.

Thousands protest in Los Angeles, July 14, 2013. Photo: AP

But first, let’s tell the truth about what this system has meant for Black people in this country...from its beginnings down to today. Let’s actually look squarely at what was revealed in the trial of George Zimmerman.
Put it this way—58 years ago a Black teenager named Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi by some white men who decided he had “acted wrong,” and those white men were acquitted.  Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till, said “NO MORE” and the uproar that she stoked was one big beginning factor that led millions of people to stand up and over the next two decades rock this country to its foundation.  People needed revolution, and many fought for revolution, and many of those heroically laid down their lives—but we got reforms.  Now, after all those reforms... after all the promises... after all the excuses... after all the Black faces in high places including even a Black president... a Black teenager named Trayvon Martin is murdered by a white man who decided he was “acting wrong,” and he too is acquitted.

No, Let’s NOT “Move On”—Let’s Draw the Lessons Of This Outrage

It’s important that we keep fully getting into what actually happened here.  It’s important that we learn everything we can about what kind of society this really is and how it operates.  It’s important that we not “move on,” and talk about “reforms” and “conversations” and blah blah before we actually deeply get into this and learn what we need to learn.
George Zimmerman decided that Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager walking home at 7:15 at night, looked “suspicious.”  He called 911 and without ever meeting or talking to Trayvon Martin, cursed him out as “a punk” and a “fucking asshole.”  He said “they always get away”—and everybody knows, unless they consciously don’t want to know, that George Zimmerman was using “they” to mean “Black people.”  He got out of his car to stalk Trayvon Martin, despite orders from 911 not to.  And then, a few minutes later, George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin with a bullet to the heart. 
Stop right there.  What does this tell you?  It tells you that George Zimmerman had been taught by America to think that every Black person is guilty until proven innocent, a threat, a “problem”... and that every white person has the right to question, judge and hunt down any Black person who rubs him the wrong way.  Ask yourself: how did George Zimmerman learn this?  Ask yourself: how many times a day do these same vicious assumptions poison social interactions in schools, stores, the streets, workplaces, and—most deadly of all—with the police or wannabe pigs like Zimmerman?  Ask yourself: does this have anything to do with how America was built and how it achieved and maintained its vaunted wealth, and the traditions it passed on to justify all that and to reinforce the new forms in which it goes on?
Then there’s the police.  When the police arrived they tested the victim for drugs and let the killer—George Zimmerman—go home, that very night.  Ask yourself: is this somehow unusual for the police to do?  No, this is so accepted—and so integral to this system—that this didn’t even get brought up at the trial!  This is how the police are trained, in every city of the country—in any conflict between a Black person and someone who is white, the white person is assumed to be in the right, even if the white person had murdered someone in their own neighborhood with only the flimsiest of stories to justify it.   All a white person has to do is to say that the Black person “looked suspicious” and the pigs are right there with him.
What if the roles had been reversed?  What if somehow Trayvon Martin fearing for his life had wrestled Zimmerman's gun away and in defending himself had shot Zimmerman?  What do you think would have happened?  If Trayvon Martin had not been immediately gunned down by the police, which is by far the most likely thing, he would have been sent to prison for a long long time.  And in prison he would have joined hundreds of thousands of other Black and Latino youth who have been shipped off to America’s prison system—the biggest, and most discriminatory, in the whole world by far.  Ask yourself: if this is the greatest country in the world... if America used to “discriminate” (a word which itself cleans up and covers over a history of kidnapping, rape, enslavement, lynching, humiliation and violence at every turn) but now is supposedly “post-racial” or at least “improving”—how do you account for the explosive growth of America’s prison system (ten times as many prisoners today as 50 years ago), with over half of those prisoners either Black or Latino in a country that is majority white?
It took a massive national movement to even force a trial of Zimmerman.  Then what happened?  First the media began to work to plant doubts and uncertainty—maybe Trayvon Martin had been doing something wrong, maybe he was a “bad kid,” and on and on and on.  How many times did anyone in the mass media bring out the basic points made above about the history and present-day reality of this country?  Ask yourself: WHY does the media work so hard to shape people’s thinking and WHY is it always in the direction of justifying what this system does or is planning to do?
Then it came to trial.  First the judge made a number of outrageous rulings.  First, Zimmerman’s lawyers invoked the Batson rule—which was originally designed to prevent prosecutors from engaging in a strategy dismissing almost all Black jurors without cause and was a rule that people had to fight tooth and nail for. The judge ruled in the defense’s favor—and ruled against the prosecution’s dismissing WHITE people who they felt were prejudiced in favor of Zimmerman.   So a rule designed to prevent all-white juries was used to justify... an almost all-white jury!  Then the judge said that the prosecution could use the word “profiling” but not RACIAL profiling.  In other words you could say Zimmerman was profiling—but you could NOT say that it was because of race.  These rulings meant two things: that the jury would be mainly white; and that they would not be challenged in their assumptions and thinking about race.  This meant that even if some of the jurors said, “hey, this is clearly a case of murder”—which apparently some did—the other jurors would be sitting there with all the power of hundreds of years of white supremacist, racist thinking that every white person is taught, and they would use that and hammer down those who somehow saw the truth of the matter.  This rigged things right from the beginning.  What does that tell you about “equal justice before the law”?  What does that tell you about how not just George Zimmerman, but the vast majority of whites are trained to view Black people?  Here is an example of how “color-blindness” in a society riven by the pervasive, all-round oppression of people due to their skin color works to perpetuate that oppression.
Those decisions alone were probably enough to determine the verdict.  But they still weren’t done.  Rachel Jeantel—a young Black woman whom Trayvon had reached out to befriend—came on the stand to talk about the trauma of being on the phone as her friend Trayvon told her how he was being followed... and how his voice was suddenly cut off after hearing him shout “Get off, get off.”  Rachel Jeantel was then hounded by Zimmerman’s attorney and, almost worse, was made into a target of media scorn and venom.  The chorus—which again used all the “polite” but utterly racist code words—was as deafening as it was dehumanizing and disgusting.  The level of personal attack focused on how she dressed, how she spoke, and all the rest... the snide sneering of the racist was broadcast from every television in the country.  Zimmerman’s lawyers and the media snake-mouths tried to destroy her and when she maintained her certitude and her dignity and then showed defiance of this baiting—and to her great credit, she did—they went after her even more viciously.  Make no mistake—this was done both to hammer the jury into the “right verdict” and to prepare public opinion for it AND TO REINFORCE ALL THE RACIST SHIT IN WHITE PEOPLE’S THINKING AND ALL THE DEFENSIVE OBSESSION WITH RESPECTABILITY IN SOME BLACK PEOPLE’S THINKING... while setting up this teenager to take the blame. 
But then came the pigs!  See how smoothly they backed up George Zimmerman.  See how they skimmed over the blatant inconsistencies from one version of his story to another.  See how the prosecutors refused to ask them about their egregious bias and intentional “incompetence” and then pandered to the white entitlement ways of thinking and being in this society in the whole way they presented their case and argued it to the jury. See how the jury—conditioned by ten million hours of TV and a lifetime of breathing the air, such as it is, of America—lapped it up.  WHY do you think that is?  WHAT does that tell you about how America works?
Yet still it wasn’t enough.  A parade of witnesses came on to testify about how wonderful George Zimmerman was.  And then, as a final blow, the defense was allowed to put on a witness who said that two young Black men had burglarized her house.  What the FUCK did that have to do with the death of Trayvon Martin?  How in the HELL was that in any way relevant?  It wasn’t!  All it was meant to do—in this trial in which we are being told “race was not an issue”—was to evoke the irrational, racial conditioning in the jury, instilled by decades of living in America. 
In this light, here we have to quote an article we ran right after the verdict, talking about how the defense claimed that Trayvon Martin was armed with a deadly weapon—a chunk of sidewalk, which they waved around in front of the jury.  In fact, Trayvon Martin didn’t have a chunk of anything.  This demagogue was referring to the fact that Zimmerman claimed Trayvon hit Zimmerman’s head on the sidewalk.  As our article pointed out, this means that any Black youth walking on a sidewalk can now be considered armed and dangerous. 
So, no, Zimmerman was not acquitted because the case was hard to prove, as some educated idiots who very well know better proclaim from their perches on television.  And no he was not mainly acquitted due to the prosecution’s “mistakes” (though their mistakes were plentiful and serious).  And no he was not acquitted because the “system didn’t work this time.”  He was acquitted because THE SYSTEM DID WORK—to draw on, to use, to reinforce and to in fact deepen the racism of this society.........