Your heterodox take on these issues is invaluable: a constant goad and prod. I think of you as the tip of the counternarrative spear. (FWIW, the number of unarmed black men killed by the cops in 2021 was down to 6. I thought that the WAPO had 14 or 15, not 17 in 2020, but regardless: way down from what is already a much smaller figu…
Your heterodox take on these issues is invaluable: a constant goad and prod. I think of you as the tip of the counternarrative spear. (FWIW, the number of unarmed black men killed by the cops in 2021 was down to 6. I thought that the WAPO had 14 or 15, not 17 in 2020, but regardless: way down from what is already a much smaller figure than many are willing to point out.) Having written and self-published (on Medium) a pair of in-depth investigative pieces on Trayvon Martin / George Zimmerman and Michael Brown / Darren Wilson, I know how right you are about the way in which the media drove the narrative right off the road, goaded by activists. I continue to be astonished by the way in which not just the general public and activists, but supposedly serious journalists and academics, continue to get the most basic facts wrong. Just yesterday, on the tenth anniversary of Martin's death, Charles Blow wrote in the NYT that on the night Trayvon was confronted by Zimmerman, "He was carrying Skittles and a can of iced tea." No. He was carrying Skittles and a can of Arizona Watermelon Fruit Juice Cocktail. Why should I trust somebody's epic take on the "resonances" of the case when he can't even get the facts right? Zimmerman's ethnicity, as you pointed out, was plausibly Hispanic--that's how he ID'd himself on the voting rolls--but he was also 1/8th black, thanks to an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather: the same degree of blackness as Homer Plessy. Zimmerman, were he living in Sanford, Florida in the 1890s, would have been restricted to the Jim Crow car. When the FBI interviewed 30+ of his friends, family, and co-workers, they couldn't find a single person who said that he had ever exhibited racial animus. (This doesn't mean that he didn't racially profile Martin--I think he did, inadvisably but understandably, considering the crime wave The Retreat had been experiencing--but it does help explain why the DOJ ultimately decided not to prosecute him.) An independent investigator who simply tries to ascertain the widest and most accurate possible array of facts about that case quickly realizes that virtually nobody, and certainly not activists, journalists, and academics, has tried to do that. They have been content to allow the continuing narrative of anti-Black racism on American soil to overwhelm the often paradoxical elements of the case--such as the fact that Martin's own friends knew he was a rough-and-tumble fighter and CELEBRATED him as that, and that witness John Good, who clearly had the best view of the physical encounter between Martin and Zimmerman, saw Trayvon doing what he was celebrated (and occasionally bemoaned) for doing, which was giving GZ a beatdown. But I digress. What I love about Reilly's essay, and what deserves even more discussion, is why the media is so invested in this particular narrative. Trayvon, of course, was routinely compared to Emmett Till--the latter being a victim of baroquely rabid white supremacist violence in 1950s Mississippi. Till's death, augmented by his mother's brave and principled decision to give him an open casket funeral, spurred the civil rights movement; it produced a last-straw response in many. Zimmerman's acquittal in Trayvon's murder trial did the same thing, in a sense, by generating BLM as a hashtag and then an organization. George Floyd was actually the last-straw moment, but Trayvon's death laid the kindling. So: America's uneasy racial conscience, some existential debt not yet paid, requires a certain kind of sacrificial victim, framed by activists and journalists as such, in order to generate the drama needed to move people to action. My question is: WHY? What is it about the way race and our national imagination works that these black male figures, these friezes of suffering and death, feed us and move us in that way. I suspect that an answer may lie much further back than we realize, with the figure of Stowe's Uncle Tom. Not the reviled Uncle Tom of a much later Black Power period--the timid Negro content to remain proximate to whiteness, subservient, rather than joining the Revolution--but the Uncle Tom of Stowe's novel and the decades worth of so-called Tom shows that followed. I'm thinking here of an academic study that deserves more attention: "Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White From Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson, by film scholar Linda Williams. Here's a bit of flap copy: "The black man suffering at the hands of whites, the white woman sexually threatened by the black man. Both images have long been burned into the American conscience through popular entertainment, and today they exert a powerful and disturbing influence on Americans' understanding of race. So argues Linda Williams in this boldly inquisitive book, where she probes the bitterly divisive racial sentiments aroused by such recent events as O. J. Simpson's criminal trial. Williams, the author of Hard Core, explores how these images took root, beginning with melodramatic theater, where suffering characters acquire virtue through victimization." That's one useful place where I think this conversation might go: America's longstanding need for such figures. They're a crucial part of the psychodrama. Dr. Reilly is inarguably one of the leading deconstructors--maybe the #1 deconstructor--of that psychodrama.
Your heterodox take on these issues is invaluable: a constant goad and prod. I think of you as the tip of the counternarrative spear. (FWIW, the number of unarmed black men killed by the cops in 2021 was down to 6. I thought that the WAPO had 14 or 15, not 17 in 2020, but regardless: way down from what is already a much smaller figure than many are willing to point out.) Having written and self-published (on Medium) a pair of in-depth investigative pieces on Trayvon Martin / George Zimmerman and Michael Brown / Darren Wilson, I know how right you are about the way in which the media drove the narrative right off the road, goaded by activists. I continue to be astonished by the way in which not just the general public and activists, but supposedly serious journalists and academics, continue to get the most basic facts wrong. Just yesterday, on the tenth anniversary of Martin's death, Charles Blow wrote in the NYT that on the night Trayvon was confronted by Zimmerman, "He was carrying Skittles and a can of iced tea." No. He was carrying Skittles and a can of Arizona Watermelon Fruit Juice Cocktail. Why should I trust somebody's epic take on the "resonances" of the case when he can't even get the facts right? Zimmerman's ethnicity, as you pointed out, was plausibly Hispanic--that's how he ID'd himself on the voting rolls--but he was also 1/8th black, thanks to an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather: the same degree of blackness as Homer Plessy. Zimmerman, were he living in Sanford, Florida in the 1890s, would have been restricted to the Jim Crow car. When the FBI interviewed 30+ of his friends, family, and co-workers, they couldn't find a single person who said that he had ever exhibited racial animus. (This doesn't mean that he didn't racially profile Martin--I think he did, inadvisably but understandably, considering the crime wave The Retreat had been experiencing--but it does help explain why the DOJ ultimately decided not to prosecute him.) An independent investigator who simply tries to ascertain the widest and most accurate possible array of facts about that case quickly realizes that virtually nobody, and certainly not activists, journalists, and academics, has tried to do that. They have been content to allow the continuing narrative of anti-Black racism on American soil to overwhelm the often paradoxical elements of the case--such as the fact that Martin's own friends knew he was a rough-and-tumble fighter and CELEBRATED him as that, and that witness John Good, who clearly had the best view of the physical encounter between Martin and Zimmerman, saw Trayvon doing what he was celebrated (and occasionally bemoaned) for doing, which was giving GZ a beatdown. But I digress. What I love about Reilly's essay, and what deserves even more discussion, is why the media is so invested in this particular narrative. Trayvon, of course, was routinely compared to Emmett Till--the latter being a victim of baroquely rabid white supremacist violence in 1950s Mississippi. Till's death, augmented by his mother's brave and principled decision to give him an open casket funeral, spurred the civil rights movement; it produced a last-straw response in many. Zimmerman's acquittal in Trayvon's murder trial did the same thing, in a sense, by generating BLM as a hashtag and then an organization. George Floyd was actually the last-straw moment, but Trayvon's death laid the kindling. So: America's uneasy racial conscience, some existential debt not yet paid, requires a certain kind of sacrificial victim, framed by activists and journalists as such, in order to generate the drama needed to move people to action. My question is: WHY? What is it about the way race and our national imagination works that these black male figures, these friezes of suffering and death, feed us and move us in that way. I suspect that an answer may lie much further back than we realize, with the figure of Stowe's Uncle Tom. Not the reviled Uncle Tom of a much later Black Power period--the timid Negro content to remain proximate to whiteness, subservient, rather than joining the Revolution--but the Uncle Tom of Stowe's novel and the decades worth of so-called Tom shows that followed. I'm thinking here of an academic study that deserves more attention: "Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White From Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson, by film scholar Linda Williams. Here's a bit of flap copy: "The black man suffering at the hands of whites, the white woman sexually threatened by the black man. Both images have long been burned into the American conscience through popular entertainment, and today they exert a powerful and disturbing influence on Americans' understanding of race. So argues Linda Williams in this boldly inquisitive book, where she probes the bitterly divisive racial sentiments aroused by such recent events as O. J. Simpson's criminal trial. Williams, the author of Hard Core, explores how these images took root, beginning with melodramatic theater, where suffering characters acquire virtue through victimization." That's one useful place where I think this conversation might go: America's longstanding need for such figures. They're a crucial part of the psychodrama. Dr. Reilly is inarguably one of the leading deconstructors--maybe the #1 deconstructor--of that psychodrama.