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mallorys_camera
Justifiable force is one of the cloudiest areas of the law, so I'm not at all surprised the Trayvon Martin case played out the way it did. If you're being beaten up, you will act to defend yourself by whatever means you have at hand. If those means include a concealed weapon that you have a permit for, you will use it in self-defense.
Make no mistake – Trayvon Martin had every right to cut across the gated community despite Zimmerman's objections to his presence. Zimmerman is one of those creepy police wannabes. Obviously, he had an agenda on that particular day.
Florida has something called the "Stand Your Ground" law by which the use of deadly force is not required to be the very last response to an attack. I would say this is a highly questionable policy in general and rather dangerous when codified as law, but in Florida, it is the law.
There were plenty of inconsistencies in Zimmerman's story. It seems obvious to me that he was stalking Martin despite his statements to the contrary. What's critical, though, are the facts of the actual physical struggle between the man and the boy. Forensic evidence strongly suggests the boy was the aggressor.
The profiling, of course, is something that occurred on both sides. Martin tells his girlfriend he's being watched by a "creepy ass cracker." Zimmerman is heard to mutter, "Fucking punks," on the phone to the emergency police dispatcher. What's interesting to me here – at least on the basis of these two epithets – is that Zimmerman's hyper vigilance seemed predicated on Martin's age while Martin's is a racial slur.
Of course, I'm the mother of a kid who frequently got stoned on marijuana all throughout high school and wandered around in places his sorry ass had no good reason for being. This being the case, my emotional sympathies here are squarely in the Trayvon Martin camp. But I think the verdict was the correct one given the facts of the case and the peculiarities of Florida law. I don't see how any jury could have found differently, and I wish there had been more diversity on the actual jury to lend the verdict some authority.
Zimmerman does not get off scot-free. He's essentially a pariah now, and a trophy. I'd say his chances for making 2015 New Year's Resolutions are not very high; the temptation to being known in the black community as the man who got justice for Trayvon Martin is just too high.
I was driving with Phyllis a few months back through a community on the tony North Shore. We got lost.
"Why don't you just pull into one of those driveways and turn around?" I suggested.
"Oh no, honey," Phyllis said. "They be looking out those big picture windows and as soon as they see who's driving the car, we'll have a police escort."
Oh. Right. Duh.
The big gap, that. No matter how tight our friendship, I'm just never gonna fully get her reality.
In other news, Lucius highly recommended Neil Jordan's Byzantium so I trekked out to Hipster Ground Zero a/k/a Williamsburg yesterday, which was the only place in greater metropolitan NYC where it was playing, to see it. It did not disappoint.
I love Neil Jordan passionately; even his bad movies like his earlier foray in bloodsucking like Interview With the Vampire starring an incredibly overwrought and miscast Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt who even way back then many years pre-Angelina was obviously jonesing for a dominatrix to pee on him. I love that Jordan makes movies about magic, even when they're not overtly about magic. The Tiresias gender-shifting overtones of The Crying Game and the pudgy Orpheus stalking a whorish Eurydice through the Hades that was swinging London in Mona Lisa are no less mythological for being subtle. My very favorite Jordan movie is The Butcher Boy, which is just so fucking weird that it defies my attempts to analyze it.
Byzantium is a much better vampire movie than Interview. In fact, as far as vampyric universes go, I would put it right up there with Buffy. For one thing, it has an entirely different creation myth: Vampires don't create each other; they can only be created in a tiny cave on a remote piece of rock floating in a grey sea. This is a sanctuary to the Old Gods whose creatures vampires are. For another, it gives a nod to the economic realities of the vampire life. They need money – who doesn't? The vampire duet in this movie is a mother/daughter team. The mother works as a BDSM hooker; the daughter goes to high school, and agonizes a lot over the fact that at 200 years old, she's the oldest sophomore in her class.
Yes, yes, the special effects – waterfalls turning to blood – are certainly amateurish. I could do better special effects with my own little antiquated Photoshop program. And the film is singularly humorless in places where it could have benefitted from a little humor. Since I know Jordan has a rather sly sense of humor as evidenced multiple times in earlier films, I can only imagine that humor was surgically removed from this piece in order to make it conform more closely to the Hammer horror code.
Afterwards I wandered around Williamsburg for a bit spying on hipsters, and then proceeded to endure the trip back to Lawn Guyland that was much, much longer than it had to be due to various rerouting of subway lines on ground buses because of Hurricane Sandy track work and an N22 bus that was an hour late. I didn't really mind. I do this trip so seldom that everything I see is all part of the parade, part of the experience. If there was any place I particularly had to be, though, I would have been pissed.
At the bus stop I fell into conversation with a Woody Allen-type guy who saw I was scribbling notes about Poughkeepsie.
"Why are you writing about Poughkeepsie?" he wanted to know.
"Well, I'm trying to figure out what went wrong," I said. "When it stopped being this enchanting little village on the banks of the Hudson and turned into a horror show."
"Well, it lost its manufacturing base," he said.
"Yes, but that would have happened in the 1940s," I said. "The urban blight I'm talking about looks more recent. I expect it happened because Poughkeepsie is just a hop, skip and a jump off Highway 87, the great crack cocaine superhighway. That's what happens when the service economy – in this case prisons – replaces the manufacturing base."
We chatted for animatedly for 45 minutes or so. I don't know why I was so surprised when he slipped me his card as he was getting off the bus. He's a dentist. Lives in New Palz, right across the river from Poughkeepsie. Doesn't like to drive. Comes to Lawn Guyland every other weekend or so to play golf.
I might call him after I move. I might not.
Also RTT called and we chatted animatedly for close to half an hour. I guess my care package policy is paying off. He hadn't heard Max's news, was duly impressed.
"So guess what area of the law he's interested in?"
"I don't know –"
"Environmental law!"
"That's what I'm interested in!"
"I know!"
"We could go into practice together –"
And then your old Mama could die happy, I thought.
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no subject
Date: 2013-07-15 01:27 pm (UTC)I will say that race isn't something that's ever seemed like an important determinant to me except in a cultural sense. I've never understood concepts like "racial superiority" or "racial inferiority." I mean, I really don't get them not even intellectually.
Yeah, there were certainly inconsistencies in Zimmerman's story. You do raise interesting question heres: did Martin not have a right under stand your ground to kick the ass of the guy following him? Why did the white Hispanic aggressor have the right to murder someone, but the black 17 year old not have the right to defend himself BEFORE the fact?
I'm not a lawyer and I haven't read the pertinent Florida law. I suspect "proactive" self-defense would constitute aggravated assault or worst though. There's no way it can be "self defense" if you're initiating the physical contact. Again, haven't read the legal definition of "self defense" under Florida state law, but I imagine it hinges on physical contact.
As the mother of a teenage boy, I know how remarkably easy it is to bait teenagers and how once they're baited, most of them will stand up and act a certain way because it's tied into a certain behavioral code that's almost -- dare I say it -- chivalric. So I understand Martin's behavior from that perspective. I do have to be honest here and note that this behavior can appear very threatening to me, particularly when I don't know what I'm doing that's "baiting" them.
I would say this is a teenage behavior that has absolutely nothing to do with race.
But race is one of the factors that teenagers organize their social groups around, so in that sense it does have to do with race, if you get my distinction here.
I'm with Obama's white grandma: If I see a group of black teenagers on the sidewalk 200 feet ahead of me, I cross the street. FWIW, I'd do the same if I saw a group of white teenagers on the sidewalk 200 feet ahead of me. Not with Asians though.
Does this make me racist or just commonsensical? Honestly, I don't know. What pundits call "profiling," I'd call "intuition." The difference is that I'm not codifying my responses into institutional policy or law.
no subject
Date: 2013-07-16 12:59 am (UTC)Why wouldn't you cross the street if you saw a bunch of Asians? Did you ever go to Marina when you lived on the Peninsula? It's full of Asian gangs. There's tons of them here in Australia too and have been for decades. I've walked past plenty of groups of black boys/men and the worst I've ever copped was some whistling or suggestive comments. I'm talking both here and in Australia. I'm fairly certain the fact I'm mixed race doesn't have much to do with it either.
If you still don't think this is a racial matter, I point to this: io9.com/disturbing-chart-shows-rise-in-justified-killings-of-773490798
no subject
Date: 2013-07-16 11:53 am (UTC)I've never been physically attacked by Asian males. I have been by black, white and Hispanic males.
And I really do think Zimmerman would have reacted the same way if the suspicious looking kid had been white. It fits the police wannabe personality profile. But, of course, there is no way of proving that.
no subject
Date: 2013-07-17 11:19 am (UTC)"This is my experience, so this is what I think someone with a similar privilege as me would think."
"This is what I think he would do/not do."
This is an assumption - a *sympathy* - in his favor that is unwarranted, and it is one that is racial. You are relying on your instincts, your limbic brain, which is where racial prejudice originates. (I'm not saying you're a racist by the way. I don't believe it for a second and I wouldn't be friends with you if I thought you were one!)
And it is this that is ultimately responsible for why every time someone does a poll on the state of race relations in the US, about double the whites think everything is equal and peachy, while most blacks think otherwise.
Did you know Zimmerman called the police seven times about black men/boys in the area prior? One time 7-9 years old.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/22/george-zimmerman-s-history-of-911-calls-a-complete-log.html
no subject
Date: 2013-07-17 01:59 pm (UTC)Cites for this? I'm not asking to be snarky. I'm genuinely curious. My understanding is that fear originates in the limbic brain. But that's not the same as racial bias.
My own experience would seem to indicate that racial bias is a learned behavior. Based on a very small sample size -- observations of my own two kids in multicultural daycare environments as tots. They didn't differentiate between white kids or black kids as playmates. Meaning that differentiation -- which I don't think either of them ever learned, by the way -- occurs later.
You can call me a racist if you want, by the way. :-) I think a certain degree of racism is endemic in my generation of Americans. :-) It won't affect my respect or affection for you because I know where you're coming from, I respect your opinion and I value the opportunity to have open dialogue about a subject that is generally either hidden away or clothed in shrieking rhetoric.
Yes, I did know about Zimmerman's phone calls. I don't dispute Zimmerman's racism. Only the allegation that he's a white racist. He's not. He's a Hispanic racist.
no subject
Date: 2013-07-18 02:32 am (UTC)http://www.medicaldaily.com/articles/10458/20120626/racism-decision-cognition-emotional-ethnicity-human-brain-psychology.htm
There was also a 2008 study by a guy named Kluger I can't find any information on online.
Not a neuroscientist, but I don't think learned behavior and the limbic system are entirely divorced from one another.
Also Hispanic is not a race. Hispanic just means you're a Spanish speaking person in the New World (as opposed to Spain). There are white Hispanics, black Hispanics, mixed race Hispanics etc. Most are mixed. Zimmerman is half white and half white or at best SOR Hispanic. He grew up in a white middle class environment. He clearly took on the prejudices of white America. I'm sure he's experienced racism as a Latino man, but that doesn't exclude him from being an anti-black racist himself.
And if you ever do say anything racist, i'll be sure to let you know :P
xo