Right-wing apologist Shelby Steele wrote the following in the wake of the Trayvon Martin tragedy in last week's Wall Street Journal (04/06/2012):
...Trayvon's sad fate clearly sent a quiver of perverse happiness all across America's civil rights establishment, and throughout the mainstream media as well. His death was vindication of the "poetic truth" that these establishments live by. Poetic truth is like poetic license where one breaks grammatical rules for effect. Better to break the rule than lose the effect. Poetic truth lies just a little; it bends the actual truth in order to highlight what it believes is a larger and more important truth.
The civil rights community and the liberal media live by the poetic truth that America is still a reflexively racist society, and that this remains the great barrier to black equality. But this "truth" has a lot of lie in it. America has greatly evolved since the 1960s. There are no longer any respectable advocates of racial segregation. And blacks today are nine times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by whites.
There is a sickness at the core of Shelby Steele's apparent perception of the civil rights movement that I can not fathom.
No one is "happy" about the death of Trayvon Martin--except maybe some of the fringe elements that Steele and Rush Limbaugh represent. Conservative commentary on the case has lent an ugly sidelight to the tragedy. Even a cursory reading of some of the comments on conservative sites reveals enough vitriol to make one heartsick.
Why does the outcry among people of good will from all races and stations from all over the world for simple justice goad people like Shelby Steele and Rush Limbaugh (who made the same characterization) to impugn their motives? For Steele's part, his words display an astonishing detachment from the realities of racial life in America today. Most black people don't view America as a "reflexively racist society." The civil rights community depended on the evolution of attitudes among the races in America and the innate sense of fairness, justice, and tolerance that is the hallmark of the movement to create the groundswell of voices that led to the arrest of George Zimmerman. This country has come a long way in sixty years. Black Americans are taking full advantage of the opportunities afforded us since we threw off the yoke of Jim Crow. We are doctors and lawyers and teachers and nurses and programmers and coaches and accountants and geeks. We are integrated into the fabric of this nation. The Trayvon Martin case is proof of that.
People like Steele and Limbaugh are stuck in a time-warp; they believe that the rest of the country has not moved ahead.
We are moving ahead. Black-on-black crime is a problem that leaders like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and others have consistently raised. They have done so from the beginning. The non-violence on which the civil rights movement is based has a deep-seated appeal in black America.
We black people were brought here by violence. We were kept in place by violence. Our labor was extracted by violence. We were controlled by violence. We were freed by violence. After that, our rights were kept from us by violence. We have been defined by violence.
We learned our lesson well. We used violence to settle domestic disputes. We used violence to discipline our children. When we used violence to settle disputes among one another, the police looked the other way because it saved them the trouble of shooting us themselves.
The Negro has no rights that the white man is bound to respect isn't some quaint phrase from a Supreme Court decision; it's the way too many conservatives feel today. Why should George Zimmerman pay for shooting a black kid that probably would have gotten it anyway? The attitude seems to be that if we accept violence from each other, there should be no problem when it comes from white privilege and authority. That attitude explains why the initiatives of George Zimmerman's first defense team against Martin consisted of "blacking him up" in the media... playing up the suspension from school... the alleged marijuana residue in his backpack... the "thug" pictures and Twitter handle. It explains why the Sanford Police and Florida State Attorney Norm Wolfinger assumed that they could turn their backs on the Martin Family's demand for justice.
Thing is--even with all that said--we are still just like everyone else: We, too, want to be let alone to live our lives. Black America is not a monolith any more than is white America. We are individuals. That is why we need to remain vigilant. That is why the civil rights movement remains strong--why it has to remain strong in the face of all that conservatives have done to stamp it out. People of all races, stations, and situations rallied around the Martins. We still need to support each other. We still need to believe in each other. We need to heed Edward R. Murrow's admonition that we not "walk in fear of one another."
Everyone has a stake in justice. Women who demand choice or poor people who protest economic inequality or LGBT couples who want marriage equality or workers organizing a union need protection from those benighted right-wingers who feel that people who don't agree with them or who live a different lifestyle have no rights that they are bound to respect. We have to stand up for each other.
It is the right thing to do. It is the American thing to do. We will not survive our current crisis otherwise.