No sooner did television stations cut into live Saturday night programming all across the nation than the news media began speculating about riots. Now that George Zimmerman had been acquitted, they said, America had to worry about black people going berserk.
Who are the real racists here?
There were no reports of riots overnight. I do not expect any. There are some people upset about the verdict, and they’re taking to social media and other available outlets to say so. But there have been no reports of trouble in the streets or anything of the sort the media has been girding for.
I would like to make an announcement to the lamestream media: Contrary to what you obviously think, black people are not animals! Just because some folks have a problem with something that’s happened doesn’t mean we’re going to riot. It is the height of condescension and arrogance for the media to constantly hint that we will.
But the media’s entire treatment of this case bore that same type of racially charged arrogance, starting with the very fact that it received as much coverage as it did. I don’t mean to minimize the loss of any person’s life, but in my city of Atlanta there were 85 murders last year. Every one of those lives was important and not one deserved to be taken. But I didn’t see the national media descending upon Atlanta to cover these cases or the subsequent trials.
They chose to obsess over the killing of Trayvon Martin and the trial of George Zimmerman because the trial fit a racial narrative they like to promote. They turned the trial into a political conflict, and I was sorry to see that people on both sides of the ideological divide played to type – rooting for “their guy” as if Martin and Zimmerman were proxies for American liberalism and conservatism respectively.
That was a shame because the facts in any criminal case are always complex, and while you may feel an emotional stake in a particular outcome, it is an important aspect of our system that we protect the rights of the accused such that certain facts must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
Despite some of the anger expressed on Saturday night, there is no doubt in my mind that most American blacks understand this quite well. We know that these protections have been valuable to us, especially during periods of the nation’s history – and especially here in the South – when we were frequent targets for false accusations and in many cases those protections may have saved our lives.
The Martin family deserves credit for urging people to behave responsibly regardless of the verdict. The same cannot be said for Al Sharpton and his media colleagues who did everything they could to undercut such sober appeals and stir black people up. We did not take the bait! (By the way, where was Al Sharpton when those 85 Atlanta murders were committed?)
I don’t know if the facts of the case justified an acquittal or not. I did not follow the case that closely. Some expected an all-female jury to be inclined toward conviction, but these six women showed that the facts, not emotion, were what guided their decision.
I do know, however, that the media did its best to light a racial powder keg with the way it presented the story, and with its constant implications about how black Americans would react.
Sorry we disappointed you, media. We are capable of disagreeing without resorting to riots and savagery. The real news here is that this comes as news to you.
