A month after Trayvon Martin’s death, President Obama weighed in on the shooting, saying: “…when I think about this boy (Martin), I think about my own kids …You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
But President Obama has two beautiful, elegant daughters. They attend one of D.C.’s most admired private schools. They were born into society’s elite and are destined to remain such. Obama’s daughters will attend Ivy League schools and have their futures handed to them on silver platters. So when they walk (more like are escorted) home at night, dressed in their business or business-casual suits, I highly doubt they will be “profiled” for the thugs that preyed upon George Zimmerman’s neighborhood. Obama’s ethereally existing son would have “looked” anything like Trayvon did at the time of his death, as well. And the word “look” in this case is the crux of this piece.
A large part of the Zimmerman saga revolved around “profiling.” Prosecutors inferred that Zimmerman presumed Martin was up to no good because he was a young Black male, regardless that the majority of crimes committed in his gated neighborhood had been committed by young Black men, like Martin, and needless to say, resembled him in dress and comportment (ahh, the key word: comportment).
Zimmerman and his attorneys emphatically denied he had “profiled” Martin. But to these denials I say: SO WHAT? So what if Zimmerman had “profiled” Trayvon? Who of us, of any race, wouldn’t have?
Living in Washington D.C., I pass young Black men and women on the street dressed in suits or just casual, like me, speaking normally, comporting themselves amiably, like most of us, and I take no notice. In fact, I’ve only now taken “notice” now for the mere sake of this article. Hence the point: they’re just people, like me, like you, like the guys bantering next to me in this cigar lounge; they melt into faceless middle-class masses surrounding us daily.
But “popular” Black culture, created and fueled by the “hip-hop media complex,” as I call it, sees it much differently. The Al Sharptons, the Jesse Jacksons, the Van Jones, and liberals in general demand all Black Americans be inextricably entwined with and thus defending the disheveled, low-class, loud, obnoxious, belligerent, vulgar, disrespectful, trashy hordes that are unfortunately the majority of the young Black Americans I see living here, and that anyone can see in any urban area.
Call me a racist for saying this (you will be wrong). A racist hates everyone of a particular race, regardless of class. Thus, I am no racist; I am a realist. I see reality and respond accordingly. I pull no punches or bulls***. I’ll say this to anyone: the majority of Black youths I see here, or home in Baltimore, or Philly, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago — you name it — are the absolute OPPOSITE of what the Civil Rights leaders of the past wished young Black Americans to be.
These particular Black Americans, in essence, are “Trayvon Martin,” with his Twitter handle “@NO_LIMIT_NIGGA”, and his fake gold teeth, his fighting, school suspensions, marijuana obsession, seeming homophobia, stolen jewelry, Facebook postings of him giving the middle finger, and his musings on wanting to buy a gun… Trayvon was, in truth, sliding into the oblivion that is now the norm for a great amount of Black youths. He was ANYTHING but what that son of Barack Obama’s would “look like.”
Trayvon Martin, like so many young Black Americans these days, was responding to a calling, a calling of the “hip-hop media complex” that does anything but promote the aptitudes or positive contributions Black Americans can make to America, for its perception of “positive contributions” is lopsided, and for all intents and purposes, solidly deranged; antithetical to a successfully functioning society. It is a beckoning that murkily mingles race and class, and has done so for 400 years. This is why America’s continual “discussions on race” are, well, continual…
This isn’t a history lesson, but in a nutshell, as Black Americans fled the despotic South for the safety of northern cities they developed a distinct ,urban-based culture. This is mere Sociology 101. Yet it’s not so easy to discern “urban culture” from “Black culture” today, is it, as many non-Blacks subscribe to it, too. But it is still Black-based. Thus, they own it. And White guilt has allowed that culture to permeate throughout nearly all of American culture to various degrees.
Everyone knows what happened to Black America after the Civil Rights movement — the worst aspects of urban–based Black culture were given carte blanche to thrive and eventually overtake and dictate how all of Black America should look, behave, and believe. To be “Black” grew to become synonymous with being “urban”…and to be urban became synonymous with its worst cultural offspring — counter–culture thuggery.
My God, how many of us from the suburbs can relate to growing up alongside Black kids who portrayed themselves like they were from “the hood”? I sure can! …It became a sad devolution into the abyss of cultural suicide on the part of a vast swath of Black America, instinctively commanded by the yearning to be anything and anyone unlike the dominate race and culture that had raked their asses over the coals for generations. It was a reaction that is understandable, yet horribly counterproductive. And Trayvon Martin fell into this “culture.”
Trayvon fell into a culture that Obama’s kids will never experience. It is an enormous, steel-hard portion of Black America that Black America must come to admit, disavow, disown, and eradicate. Yet Black Americans who attempt to do this do so at their peril; peril of losing reputations, relationships, even family members.
To reject one another for trying to break out of “the hood;” to condemn classmates who study hard and pay attention as acting “white;” to excuse passing time in jail as a right-of-passage of your race; to attack those who’ve climbed up society’s rungs and made something of themselves; to condemn those who speak discernible English and not sound like Elmer Fudd with Down’s Syndrome; to condemn fellow members of your “community” who bear no hatred towards other ethnicities; to reject those who reject the narcissistic “woe-is-me … we-were-oppressed-therefore-we-deserve” mindset that keeps so much of Black America trapped not in compounds rather than communities; to reject those of you who respect themselves and others in public, who dress respectively, COMPORT themselves with decency; who do not rage against authority and the law just because “it’s their duty” … and finally, to hold bone-deep contempt for those who’ve broken out of the prison of the liberal Democrat mindset and escaped to the freedom of contemplative, self-improving conservatism, calling them every name from Uncle Toms to Oreo Cookies and race-traitors…? To reject all who are law-biding, decent, composed, goal-driven and respectful among you?
No … These are not traits of a supposed race-based “culture.” This is not a culture at all. This is a CULT. Popular Black culture behaves like a CULT rather than a culture (minus the whole “if-you-try-to-escape-we’ll-kill-you-Jonestown-Guyana” aspect).
The rabid hostility we see from allegedly “mainstream” Black America towards people like Thomas Sowell, Sen. Tim Scott, Dr. Benjamin Carson, Herman Cain, Michael Steele, Ben Kinchlow, Sen. Allen West, Mia Love, Justice Clarence Thomas, etc., is more the behavior of a cult than a culture. This hypnotic, knee-jerk revulsion to all those who do not dress, speak, behave, believe or at least defend today’s urban-dominated Black socio-political culture is indicative of perhaps the largest and most unrecognized, undeclared cult of all time.
And millions of Americans, including middle and upper-class Black Americans, give this CULT a pass due to the pain that the race it was born from endured.
SALVATION or DOWNFALL? — The Zimmerman Verdict’s Fallout
The Zimmerman-Martin tragedy was a golden opportunity for Black America to reflect on all it has allowed its “pop CULTure” to become in the name of honest suffering (to put it mildly), disproportionately producing throngs of young Black males that storm the houses of people like Olivia Bartalan, who testified to Zimmerman’s honest concern for her after her home was invaded by two guys who …”looked like” Trayvon Martin.
In truth, if so many street criminals did not “look” like Trayvon Martin, then maybe Trayvon Martin would not have fallen under suspicion. Has that ever occurred to anyone? Has anyone had the balls to ask/say that yet?!
Maybe if this obscene, concrete-based, anti-authority, anti-education, anti-respect, pro-belligerence, pro-vulgarity, hyper-materialistic culture had not been allowed to overtake Black America and supposedly speak for all of it, then maybe George Zimmerman and the rest of Americans wouldn’t do double-takes at the “Trayvon Martins” they see on the street or in their neighborhoods.
Ironically, the most racist rant against Black Americans I’ve ever heard did not come from a White mouth. It came from an Ethiopian cab driver, whose condemnations and slurs — which I had somehow provoked via a casual mentioning of a “flash mob” incident in D.C.’s Chinatown — would put any Klansman’s diatribe to shame. Whose fault was it that this man felt this way -– mine..? White people? Hispanics’? Eskimos’..? No, it was through his own experiences, living among the CULT that has become accepted as a culture. It was the CULT’S’s fault, no one else’s.
Perhaps one day, enough Black Americans will come to openly agree: hey, we have an image problem … BIG TIME. And no longer can anyone be blamed for it but ourselves; we who live it, we who promote it, and those of us who excuse it or turn a blind eye to it. We have a problem now of our own making, and no one else can solve it but us…
That is what the Zimmerman–Martin saga has really been about.
This is the question Black America should ultimately be asking itself: who is really at fault, culturally, morally, and in spirit for this tragedy? The supposed Black “community” and guilt–stricken White liberals can blame all they wish. But in reality, if Black America really wants to see the ultimate culprit for this saga … find the closest mirror.
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