When Rachel Jeantel says 'cracker,' it's a cultural thing...

[LoungeMachine]

Only ONE of us has never used the term N*****



fool.

[jhale667]

Reminder: Someone Was Murdered
By Amanda Marcotte
Friday, June 28, 2013 9:07 EDT


Looking at this picture makes it legal to murder you in 15 states. Sorry.

If you ever want to get a full eyeball of how little value is put on the life of a young black man by white nitwits, just watch all the digressions and whining and mockery inspired by the George Zimmerman trial. Like Hamilton Nolan said, “The tragic shooting death of Trayvon Martin continues to be one of America’s richest sources of tangentially-related arguments.” It would be funny, except it’s awful, because someone was murdered and it turns out that you can basically get away with murder in Florida if you create even the barest bones plausibility for self-defense, up to and including chasing someone down until they, fearing they have no other choice, take a swing at you in hopes to escape your scary ass. If I understand correctly, that’s Zimmerman’s defense and how fucking crazy is that if it works?! You can legally murder someone so long as you scared them enough they acted in self-defense first? (As long as they’re black, of course, but that’s not explicitly stated.) That needs to be the only thing being discussed right now. With that in mind, I made a list of tangential White People Whines that immediately mark the whiner not just as a racist, but someone whose bigotry has completely dissolved their basic ability to understand that murder is wrong.

1) Wah! I want to make “cracker” the equivalent of the N-word! The very act of instigating a debate over whether or not “cracker” is really a racist term in the same way that other ones is stupid in the best of circumstances. (Thanks for reminding me of all my white privilege, person who called me a “cracker”!) But to bring it up now because Rachel Jeantel, the last person who spoke to Trayvon Martin before he was shot to death by George Zimmerman, mentioned that Martin called Zimmerman a “creepy-ass cracker”, makes you a moral monster. Even if you could prove that the term is deeply offensive, so what? Are you suggesting that death is the appropriate penalty for attaching “cracker” to the extraordinarily accurate description “creepy-ass” when you’re trying to escape a terrifying fuckwit like George Zimmerman? What’s wrong with you?

To make it worse, roughly 99.9% of the people who are freaking out over the term “cracker” in this context thought that it was terrible that Paula Deen got fired over the N-word. Apparently, being sent home to count your millions is cruel and unusual punishment for a white person who says the N-word, but if a black person says “cracker”, then murdering him is A-OK. That is what you’re saying when you hold these opinions. You are a terrible, terrible person, if so.

2) Wah! I want to make fun of Rachel Jeantel for being different from me! Rachel Jeantel, as mentioned, is the last person to speak to Martin alive. Because of that, she’s being put through a grueling multi-day testimony that involves the defense attorney being repeatedly reprimanded for trying to wear her out with repeated questioning. She’s also become a massive object of fun for soulless racists, who enjoy mocking her for being fat, speaking with an accent, being a 19-year-old who drinks and parties, and who is combative with the defense attorney who is trying to get the guy who murdered her friend off for his crime. Which apparently is a crime for people who expect women like her to always be apologetic for their very existence. Because of these attacks, there have been excellent defenses mounted of Jeantel by various writers online.

Aura Bogado from Colorlines:

Pundits are having a field day remarking on Jeantel’s “unpolished” testimony. And again, for clarity, Jeantel is a witness only because she was the last person to speak with Trayvon by phone; her testimony describes the way Trayvon was stalked by Zimmerman, and ultimately taken down to the “wet grass.” She is not a legal expert, and at 19, she is barely an adult. Social media, meanwhile, has exploded with racist and sexist reactions—especially on Facebook and Twitter. Jeantel’s size has also become a point of controversy.

Brittany Cooper at Salon:

Given the hostile and combative space into which she entered, a space in which she had to fight for the integrity of her own words, combativeness seems like the most appropriate posture.

If the justification for the defense attorney’s combativeness is “he was doing his job,” then I submit: So was Rachel.

She was there to defend her friend. And herself. Though she was not on trial, she seemed to know instinctively that Black womanhood, Black manhood, and urban adolescence is always on trial in the American imaginary.

This is all very good, but I keep going back to this: Her friend was murdered. What she looks like, talks like, etc. is irrelevant. So if you start in on, “Rachel Jeantel is fat,” I have to ask: Does that mean that her friends get to be murdered? “Rachel Jeantel talks in a way that is different from me!” Oh, I guess that means that you think it’s open season on anyone who talks to her on the phone.

This entire situation is a clear-cut example of what social justice theorists talk about when they talk about “dehumanizing” someone in order to justify oppression and violence against them. But honestly, it’s beyond that. The idiocy on display by racists trying to force a derailing debate about the “proper” way to speak English (a language that has a multitude of dialects around the world as well as within our borders), the “right” way to look, or if you can use racial slurs against white people strikes me as more than dehumanizing, however. You wouldn’t even use these kinds of arguments to rationalize murdering a dog, assholes. How can you use them to minimize the murder of a human being? What the fuck is wrong with you?

[LoungeMachine]

[ELVIS]

Only ONE of us has never used the term N*****



fool.

You want a sticker, fool ??

[LoungeMachine]

You want a sticker, fool ??

No thanks...

Just knowing you're a racist and a bigot is enough reward for me...



And buy a tuner, you hack.

[Seshmeister]

Has anyone else noticed that ELVIS each Sunday after he presumably spends hours at his church telling his sky wizard how much he loves him he then comes on here and is always more aggressive and pissed off sounding?

[sadaist]

Natural News? :D



Maybe if white people had been enslaved for hundreds of years by black people calling them crackers then they could claim parity.

You are right. Any slaves, ex-slaves, or children of slaves should please feel free to call white people anything they would like.

[ELVIS]

[LoungeMachine]

Has anyone else noticed that ELVIS each Sunday after he presumably spends hours at his church telling his sky wizard how much he loves him he then comes on here and is always more aggressive and pissed off sounding?

Oh yes.....



I swear he kicks puppies...

[ELVIS]

I didn't go to church, fags...

[jhale667]

The Quote That Should End the Trayvon Trial
By John H. Richardson


George Zimmerman is going to be found guilty. All the evidence you need — all the evidence the cops needed — is right there in the interrogation they did with him three days after the shooting. The only thing more shocking than what Zimmerman says in the clip, which was released on the internet one year ago, is how little it has impressed the bloviating jerks who dominate the coverage of this trial.

Why did he follow Martin, a police officer asks.

“These assholes, they always get away,” Zimmerman answers.

The officer asks, “What’s behind that?”

“These people who victimize the neighborhood,” Zimmerman answers.

In Zimmerman’s angry mind, without trial or jury, even after he killed him and learned he was a 17-year-old who was legitimately staying in the complex, Martin was an asshole victimizing the neighborhood.

The officer gets a little defensive at this point. “There was an arrest a week ago,” he points out, though it is also a gentle reminder that Zimmerman’s fear might be a tad misplaced. He continues, skeptically. "How was he running?" Zimmerman describes it and the officer says, “Sounds like he was running to get away... you jumped out of car to see which way he was running? That’s not fear … it’s going to be a problem.”

Then Zimmerman whispers something. “What is that you whispered?” the officer asks. “Fucking what?”

“Punks,” Zimmerman says.

This time, the officer seems genuinely taken aback. “He wasn’t a fucking punk,” he responds.

A few moments later, he asks Zimmerman why he kept following Martin even after the police dispatcher told him not to. Zimmerman’s answer is staggering.

“I wanted to give them an address.”

An address? This may be the moment that will convict him. It means that even he suspected that Martin was a legitimate visitor to the complex, staying in an apartment and legally on the property, Zimmerman continued to pursue him. And it makes sense that Martin was staying there because of the terrain, the complex being isolated from other complexes and a mile distant from the nearest shopping center. A professional thief would be moving intentionally, not wandering down the middle of the street in the full light of the streetlamps. Although Zimmerman’s fear supposedly hinges on the series of robberies that the police believed had been addressed already with an arrest, it seems clear that even Zimmerman didn’t really believe his own alibi. More likely, even in his mind, Martin was a kid from the neighborhood out smoking a joint and at the worst, looking for a little illicit excitement — a “fking punk.”

At this point, the officer asks again why he was following Martin — and Zimmerman flat-out lies. “I wasn’t following him, I was just going in the same direction he was.” The cop just laughs.

The next moment reveals another aspect of Zimmerman’s state of mind, complete paranoia. The officer plays the tape of him with the police dispatcher, when he refuses to give his address to the dispatcher “out loud” — the embattled neighborhood watch volunteer so afraid of the fking punks in his neighborhood that he’s afraid of giving the police his address, despite the complete lack of evidence that any of those punks had ever attacked him before. Like these fearsome criminals are tapping the public airwaves and listening to cell phone conversations just to get him.

Again, the officer asks why he didn’t get back in his car after being told to, why he was so determined to get Martin that he stood in the rain. “You wanted to catch him, you wanted to catch the bad guy, fking punk.”

Zimmerman goes silent. Prodded again, he says, “I felt like I didn’t give them an adequate description.” There’s an edge in his voice at this point like he’s starting to get offended. The officer tries to reassure him: “We’re working for you here.”

But they persist. How could Martin have been smothering Zimmerman at the same time Zimmerman was, as he claimed, screaming his head off for help? (This question will not be settled by the testimony of voice experts, thanks to the judge's ruling, though the jury will hear the tape.) This was just before the fatal gunshot.

“It’s continuous screaming,” another officer asks, “how can you be smothered?”

Damn good question.

“You think he might have seen you had a gun before he punched you?” the first officer asks.

Another damn good question.

“What was the provocation for punching you other than you were following him?” another officer asks.

By this time, Zimmerman is losing his patience. “I’ve gone through it a million times.” Despite his passion for justice, repeated questions about the death of a 17-year-old boy at his own hands annoys him.

Soon after, the interview devolved into pleasantries. Zimmerman says he’s taking his wife to the beach for the weekend, and the lead officer asks, “Which beach?”

Then they let him go.

[ELVIS]

[ELVIS]

'He jumped out of the bushes' and attacked me'

Jurors today heard George Zimmerman’s account in his own words of his fatal confrontation with Trayvon Martin as prosecutors played a dramatic audio tape of Zimmerman being questioned by police shortly after the shooting.



Zimmerman is heard telling a police officer how he saw Martin walking through his Sanford, Fla. neighborhood on a dark, rainy Feb. 2012 night. As a neighborhood watchman he tried to follow him in his car because there had been a series of break-ins in the gated community.

Zimmerman said he lost sight of Martin, got out of his car to call police and was walking back to his vehicle when the 17-year-old attacked him.

“He jumped out of the bushes and he said ‘What the f..k is your problem, homie?’” Zimmerman said on the tape.

“And I got my cell phone out to call 911 this time, and I said ‘I don’t have a problem.’ And he goes, ‘No, now you have a problem,’ and he punched me in the nose.”

In court, jurors listened closely to the tape, while Zimmerman showed no emotion and Martin’s father closed his eyes from time to time.

Zimmerman told police he fell down to the ground after being punched repeatedly. “I tried to defend myself. He just started punching me in the face, and I started screaming for help. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe.”

“He puts his hand on my nose and mouth, and he says ‘You are going to die tonight.’

He said “the suspect” was “mounted on top of me” and began to bang his head onto the ground.

“As he banged my head again, I just pulled out my firearm and shot him,” Zimmerman said.

He said Martin fell backward. “And he’s like ‘Alright, you got me, you got me.'”

Under questioning, Officer Doris Singleton, who conducted the audio interview, said Zimmerman appeared shocked when he learned Martin’s wound was fatal.

“He’s dead!?” she quoted him as saying.

“I thought you knew that,” she said she replied.

Zimmerman “kinda slung his head and shook it,” she said.

Jurors were also shown a second interview, this one videotaped by police a day after the slaying. In this version, Zimmerman re-enacted the confrontation and added that he pulled out his gun “after he hit my head against the concrete several times.”

The prosecution maintains that Martin, not Zimmerman, was the person that neighbors heard shouting for help that night.

[jhale667]

Dude's a liar. For starters - WTF would you straddle the dude you just shot, and have to pin his arms "because he was still talking"? And who (with a bullet through their lung, and lodged in their heart) says "You got me" except bad guys in 70s spaghetti westerns?

[ELVIS]

So, are you going to encourage rioting after this thing goes Zimmerman's way ??