In her recent post, Give Justice a Chance, my colleague Ms. Sexton discusses the Trevon Martin shooting in Florida and the media storm that has surrounded this issue. She eloquently lays out the main players in the story and describes the environment that each is trying to create. Being born after the Civil Rights movement, I have always wondered what it must have been like for minorities at lunch counters and at sit-ins across the country. What strength and courage it must have taken to stand up to the avalanche of repression that was present at that time and how committed those men and women were to achieve what they did.
The Civil Rights movement also served to bring race to the forefront of everyone’s mind, forcing everyone to choose where they stood ideologically on the issue. In very few occasions has there been such a polarizing force on our national stage. Those ripples are still being felt today, as evidenced by the media circus that has erupted around the Martin case. No time was wasted by many news outlets to paint this as a case of racial violence perpetrated by a white man on black, and there was no shortage of listeners. Radio talk shows, morning shows, newspapers and of course fringe elements on the web clamored to have a new angle or to excise some salient point that would set them apart and the truth was trampled somewhere in that stampede. Did a white man kill a black man? Yes, as far as I understand. Was the black man armed? No. Does that make this case racially motivated? That is unknown at this time. We may never know that answer. How do you measure intent? Would Zimmerman have been suspicious of Martin wandering the streets if he were a white kid? Or a Latino? Or Asian? That is the question to which we will probably never have an answer. Ms. Sexton accurately points out that the media hasn’t stopped to find that piece of information yet, and most likely because it isn’t as exciting as conjecture and sensationalism.
I think that racial issues have been blown out of proportion recently and this may be another example. Given the recent police shooting in Austin and the recent post on ESPN regarding Jeremy Lin that got 3 staff members fired, it seems that many including Rep. Chu want to keep race in the spotlight. Was that the intent of the civil rights movement though? Or was it more about moving race to the background, so that what a man or woman did and said mattered more than their skin color? I think that as long as media and others continue to remind us of our differences in a negative light, that dream will continue to be put on hold.
No comments:
Post a Comment