{"id":12177,"date":"2012-05-04T06:57:41","date_gmt":"2012-05-04T10:57:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theredphoenixapl.org\/?p=12177"},"modified":"2012-05-04T06:57:41","modified_gmt":"2012-05-04T10:57:41","slug":"why-conservatives-are-smearing-trayvon-martins-reputation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/2012\/05\/why-conservatives-are-smearing-trayvon-martins-reputation\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Conservatives Are Smearing Trayvon Martin\u2019s Reputation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

by Michelle Goldberg<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Conservatives are focusing on Trayvon\u2019s tweets, appearance, school suspension over marijuana traces, and the hoodie he was wearing to blame him for his own death\u2014and to show that his killing had nothing to do with racism. Plus<\/span> watch The Daily Beast’s John Avlon, Lloyd Grove and Harry Siegel<\/span><\/a><\/span> discuss the right-wing smear campaign against Trayvon.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

First, there was the discussion of what<\/span> Trayvon Martin<\/span><\/a><\/span> was wearing. \u201cI think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin\u2019s death as<\/span> George Zimmerman<\/span><\/a><\/span> was,\u201d<\/span> Geraldo Rivera<\/span><\/a><\/span> said on Fox & Friends last week, later suggesting that the sweatshirt made him look like a \u201cwannabe gangster.\u201d Then conservative bloggers started digging through Martin\u2019s Facebook page for information that might raise doubts about his character. It turns out that one of Martin\u2019s friends had written, under a happy birthday message, \u201cdamn were you at nigga needa plant;\u201d according to Dan Riehl at Riehl World View, \u201cSome may interpret that as Martin having somehow been involved in selling [marijuana].\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

On Monday, The Daily Caller published a list of Martin\u2019s tweets\u2014his handle was @NO_LIMIT_NIGGA\u2014that reveal him as a posturing teenager rather than a choirboy. (\u201cLol so daisha think she a boss caus she walked in class late 2day\u2026I do dat everyday,\u201d says one.) The story notes that the photograph attached to the account depicts Martin \u201csmiling, gold-toothed, into a camera in front of an electronic dartboard.\u201d Meanwhile the media was flooded with the news, if one could call it that, that Martin was once suspended from school for possession of a plastic baggie with marijuana residue on it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey’ve killed my son, and now they’re trying to kill his reputation,\u201d Martin\u2019s mother, Sybrina Fulton, said after the suspension story broke.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m far from the first to notice the similarities between the way people talk about Martin and the way they talk about rape victims, whose clothes and histories are often subject to scrutiny no matter how cut-and-dried the case seems. Like a rape victim, Martin\u2019s past is being excavated for evidence that he might have provoked the harm done to him. It hardly matters that even if Martin had gotten high every day, it would have had zero relevance; it\u2019s not as if marijuana use is linked to violence. Nor that it\u2019s not unusual for a teenager to come across as obnoxious on Twitter. People were looking for some tenuous justification for treating him as complicit in his own death, and now they\u2019ve found it. (For the record, I was also suspended from high school, though in my case for smoking cigarettes. I trust that should a stranger shoot me in the street, no one will treat this as a mitigating factor.)<\/span><\/p>\n

On the surface, it\u2019s odd that Martin\u2019s image would become so politicized. No ideological capitulation would be required for conservatives to mourn his death\u2014one can believe in gun rights and still believe that he shouldn\u2019t have been killed. A real NRA fanatic, after all, might make a case that Martin himself should have been armed, so that he could stand his ground against the paranoid man who was stalking him.<\/span><\/p>\n

Certainly, it\u2019s possible that some unknown evidence will emerge to<\/span> complicate the current narrative<\/span><\/a><\/span> of what happened between Zimmerman and Martin. Zimmerman claims that after he\u2019d been following Martin, the young man attacked him, and according to the Orlando Sentinel, police found him \u201cbleeding from the nose, [with] a swollen lip and had bloody lacerations to the back of his head.\u201d No matter how things unfolded, there\u2019s no excuse for those like<\/span> Spike Lee<\/span><\/a><\/span> who have tweeted Zimmeran\u2019s home address; if nothing else, this case should make clear the horror of vigilantism.<\/span><\/p>\n

But as of right now, some things are not in dispute. Martin was unarmed save for a pack of Skittles and an ice tea. Zimmerman, who repeatedly called the cops when he saw young black men in his gated community, trailed Martin after the police advised him not to. He called Martin either a \u201ccoon\u201d or a \u201cgoon.\u201d Martin had no documented history of violence. Zimmerman, on the other hand, was previously accused of hitting his ex-fianc\u00e9; in response, he said that she was the aggressor, which means he doesn\u2019t deny that there was a physical fight.<\/span><\/p>\n

So why this desire to paint Martin, rather than the man who shot him, as the guilty party? Partly, of course, it\u2019s just a reaction to his death becoming a cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre on the left\u2014it\u2019s the same sort of impulse that leads some conservatives to delight in \u201cFry Mumia\u201d T-shirts. Beyond that, though, some on the right are deeply invested in the idea that anti-black racism is no longer much of a problem in the United States, and certainly not a problem on the scale of false accusations of racism. You might call these people anti-anti-racists. They are determined to push back against any narrative that would suggest that a black man has been targeted for the color of his skin.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some conservatives are deeply invested in the idea that anti-black racism is no longer much of a problem in the U.S., and certainly not on the scale of false accusations of racism. <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Riehl does us the great favor of making such views explicit. \u201cIn the past when race hustlers like Jackson and Sharpton started their usual schtick over some alleged racial issue, they and the media were mostly allowed to run wild with it \u2026 But I don’t have to tolerate it, now,\u201d he writes, continuing, \u201c[L]ast time I looked, there’s a black guy in the White House. You want me to cry and feel sorry for you because America is such a racist country, or I need to explore some hidden racism deep within myself?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Other anti-anti-racists are equally determined to deny that Martin\u2019s blackness had anything to do with his death. When<\/span> President Obama<\/span><\/a><\/span> said, \u201cIf I had a son, he\u2019d look like Trayvon,\u201d<\/span> Newt Gingrich<\/span><\/a><\/span> reacted with the apoplexy he often shows in the face of anti-racism, saying, \u201cAny young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period\u2026. Is the president suggesting that, if it had been a white who’d been shot, that would be OK, because it wouldn’t look like him?\u201d<\/span> Rick Santorum<\/span><\/a><\/span> echoed, \u201cWhat the president of the United States should do is try to bring people together, not use these types of horrible and tragic individual cases to try to drive a wedge in America.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But if race has nothing to do with this case, then it makes no sense that Zimmerman was able to kill Martin without consequences\u2014unless, of course, Martin did something to provoke him. If you don\u2019t want to believe that racism is a problem in the United States, it helps to believe that Martin had it coming. Even if the only evidence is a school suspension, a tiny trace of pot, and the juvenile tweets of a kid trying to be cool.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Michelle Goldberg Conservatives are focusing on Trayvon\u2019s tweets, appearance, school suspension over marijuana traces, and the hoodie he was wearing to blame him for..<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38658,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[149,166,43,84,97,119],"tags":[357,227,347],"class_list":["post-12177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-discrimination","category-government","category-media-culture","category-statements","category-us-news","category-war","tag-racism","tag-racist-oppression","tag-workers-struggle"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redphoenix.news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1332837922538_12177_ebdad.jpg?fit=503%2C335&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}