This Fan's Seasons

Ta-Nehisi Coates, on the rank stupidity of altering the Zimmerman tape. (via theatlantic)

Well, yeah. But is it strange of me to be a bit happy that a national news source edited the tape to make Zimmerman look MORE racist, rather than less?

(via theatlantic)

— Chris Bird at Mightygodking, writing on Trayvon Martin.

This aspect of what’s been going on is the weirdest part of the past week, and I’m glad Bird stated it so cogently. I honestly don’t think that most of the people backlashing against Trayvon are doing it because they think that killing a 17 year old black boy is justified if he wears a hoodie and looks scary; maybe I am being naive, but I don’t think that these people are that evil. I think they’re just that obsessed with the Culture War bullshit.

This is why you get articles about how George Zimmerman was a registered Democrat, and why they’re so quick to point out that his mother is Latina — because in the binary Culture War version of reality, liberals are angry about Trayvon Martin, and if Zimmerman is a Democrat and a person of color, then he can be safely shunted over to our tribe. Which makes us, at best, confused (if this is all viewed through a Culture War lens, then Zimmerman/Martin is just liberal-on-liberal crime) and, if your tunnel vision is full-on blindness, hypocrites or something.

Then you smear Trayvon, because the idea that liberals could be right about something doesn’t compute. Liberals say he’s a good kid, and liberals lie constantly, so you look for proof — then the police leak info about how he got suspended from school once, and you post the pictures of a black kid (but not actually him) looking all scary and thuggish, and you start advocating “due process” like you’ve ever given a shit about that in your life, and your “don’t trust the government or the media” rhetoric goes flying out the window when a slanted police report gets reprinted in the paper — and all of this is great, because it confirms what you’ve believed for so long: liberals are liars.

And if the path you need to take to get there is smearing a murdered black kid, well, that’s just what it takes to gleefully feel self-righteous. And the Culture War triumphs.

(Incidentally, this is also why attempts to paint Zimmerman as a right-wing gun nut made me really uncomfortable — because it fits this Culture War narrative perfectly, and sets everything along the track for this same nonsense. Same thing with Jared Lee Loughner-as-Conservative activist; or the Wendy Davis arson as an anti-abortion protest. Viewing everything through that political lens feeds the Culture War, too, and lends credence to the “both sides do it” bullshit that makes it so difficult to get to any sort of truth.)

(via dansolomon)