Trayvon Martin and the White Pundits

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire Magazine

03 April 12

ill Keller of The New York Times can count himself lucky. By deciding that the shooting of Trayvon Martin, for the crime of possessing snack food while wearing a hoodie in what George Zimmerman thought was the wrong neighborhood, was the occasion for a column criticizing hate-crimes legislation - and by wedging the conviction of Dharun Ravi for precipitating the suicide of Tyler Clementi into the argument for the purposes of making it, well, an argument - Keller wrote only the second-most hamhanded piece of punditry on the Martin case these last few days. The top prize goes to old Sparkle Pants himself, former Sarah Palin groupie Rich Lowry, in the National Review, wherein Lowry pounded the keys the hardest on what has become the white conservative Wurlitzer's stock answer to the cries for some sort of justice in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin: How come you don't talk about those black kids who kill other black kids, huh, huh? In this, of course, Lowry is upholding the National Review's long-standing commitment to improving the lives of black people in America, another highlight of which was old Bill Buckley's attempt to pin on King's campaign of non-violent resistance the blame for the Newark riots in 1967 - this included:

You do realize that there are laws against burning down delicatessen stores? Especially when the manager and his wife are still inside the store? Laws Schmaws. Have you never heard of civil disobedience? Have you never heard of Martin Luther King?

Or, perhaps more apropos to our discussion was old Bill's reaction to then-vice-president Hubert Humphrey's attendance at the funeral of Viola Liuzzo, the civil-rights worker who was shot to death in her car. Old Bill noted that a white cop had been killed by a black man in Mississippi and that Humphrey had not attended the cop's funeral, so how about that, huh, huh? Old tunes on the house organ again.

As for Keller, well, there's the argument against hate-crime laws, and then there seems to be his distaste for the volume of the protests calling for some sort of judicial action against Zimmerman for shooting Martin, and never the twain. As to the former, and the argument that crime-is-crime and that hate-crime laws are essentially thought-crimes, I usually propose a one-word answer:

Kristallnacht.

If you hold to the position that Keller appears to hold, then what does one make of Kristallnacht? That it was merely an unusually violent, unusually organized conspiracy to violate the local ordinances forbidding vandalism and assault? That hardly seems adequate. If, however, you hold that it was unusually violent and unusually organized vandalism and assault with a specific political and social purpose in mind - namely, the marginalization and intimidation of a minority group for the purposes of political and social control - then you must conclude that the vandalism and assaults committed in that campaign were of a different, more serious nature than someone who throws a brick through a window or punches someone in a bar. They were crimes directed at undermining and perverting the existing political order. You could argue, I guess, that Kristallnacht was the work of a political movement whereas the crimes prosecuted under hate-crimes statutes are generally the work of two or three individuals, but that doesn't change the difference between what happened to James Byrd and, say, someone who was killed by a drunk driver. Keller admits that we prosecute people for different offenses based on what's in the defendant's mind all the time, but he seems to differentiate between the raw emotion and conscious political or social choice when judging the mens rea, and that the latter, somehow, has a penumbra of constitutional protecting that the former lacks. We disagree, I guess. But this...

In most cases, hate crime laws take offenses that would carry more modest sentences - assault, vandalism - and ratchet up the penalty two or three times because we know, or think we know, what evil disposition lurked in the offender's mind. Then we pat ourselves on the back. As if none of us, pure and righteous citizens, ever entertained a racist thought or laughed at a homophobic slur.

...is just a glib horror. How many of "us," no matter what we may think in the privacy of our own minds, have tied a black man to the bumper of a car and dragged him down a dirt road until his fking head popped off? If someone kills with unique savagery, and that savagery is based not in some dim psychological twisting but in coolly intellectualized race hatred, does the latter really have a constitutional protection because man is inherently a savage anyway?

But when Bill goes wandering into the weeds on the Martin case, well, things go awry pretty quickly.

But fashioning a narrative from the hate-crimes textbook - bellowing analogies to the racist nightmares of Birmingham and Selma, as the reliably rabble-rousing Reverend Sharpton has done - is just political opportunism. This is the kind of demagoguery that could prejudice a prosecution, or mobilize a mob.

It may have escaped Keller's recollection but, at the time the "racist nightmares" of Birmingham and Selma actually were occurring, there was a strong school of respectable opinion - and not just in the South and not just from Bill Buckley - that treated Dr. King the very same way that Keller treats Al Sharpton here: as a "rabble rouser," and as a threat to the public order. That has been the deflection of choice for the defenders of white political power for centuries. It was the primary argument against the abolitionists, and not just in the South, either. Recently, I was looking through the proceedings of the debates over the Dyer Bill, an anti-lynching act proposed in 1922. (It passed the House but it was filibustered to death in the Senate.) Here's what Hatton Summers, a congressman from Texas who opposed the bill, said in explaining why he would vote against it:

"We people who believe we understood the situation are convinced that you men are fixing to cut the cord that holds in leash the passions of race conflict in the South and bring to the South such tragedies as occurred in East St. Louis in which almost as many people were killed in that one city in one riot as are killed in the entire South by mobs in two years.... If the Federal government interposes its power, assumes responsibility now borne entirely by the people, so that the man on the ground will feel that it is not his duty to protect, but that the Federal government has stepped in and will take care of the situation, then you are likely to turn loose the passions of race conflict in that community."

(I also would point out that anti-lynching laws were essentially rudimentary hate-crimes legislation, although the term had not yet been invented, because lynchings were far more than simply well-organized and festive public homicides. They were mechanisms of social control that supported a system of American apartheid. They had a political element to them that did not mitigate them. It exacerbated them.)

(Also, the "East St. Louis" tragedy that Summers mentions was a virtual pogrom during which white mobs ran riot in the city, devastating the black community in no small part because they'd been told by local segregationists that black people were arming themselves. Local law enforcement abandoned the city to the mobs. An estimated 200 people were killed. But, of course, they largely brought it on themselves.)

The Dyer bill was meant to find some kind of justice for the victims of unpunished killings. It was necessary because local government, and local law enforcement, were both unwilling and unable to bring that justice themselves. That is really all that people are asking for in Florida right now. If people think the calls are too strident, they should realize that the voices are calling out all the way through history to be heard.