The use to which the “race hustlers” have put the death of Trayvon Martin is a travesty added to a tragedy. Their objective is to parlay the young man’s death into a payoff of political power and cash. None of those protesting the death, the likes of Al Sharpton, Cornel West, Tavis Smiley, Jesse Jackson and Harry Belafonte, care any more about Trayvon than they care about all the blacks killed by other blacks in cities across America. You never heard them lament the deaths of those blacks. It stands to reason, then, to conclude that had Trayvon Martin been killed by a fellow black: end of story.
The provocateurs of racial discord latched onto the Trayvon tragedy because the mainstream media profiled George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon, as “white.” That profile effectively portrayed the killing as a white-on-black “murder,” which heightened the potential for violence in an already volatile atmosphere. The race hustling extortionists wasted no time cashing in on the media’s description. Using the most incendiary rhetoric possible — “Trayvon was hunted down like a rabid dog” — they set out to ignite the combustible climate into a racial conflagration.
When, later on, we learned that Zimmerman was not “white,” but Hispanic, it appeared for a moment that the correction might chill the blazing hot tongues of the race hustlers. But no, not by one degree did the flame throwers cool their racist rant. They surmounted the minor obstacle of Zimmerman’s real identity simply by designating him a “white Hispanic.”
The race hustler’s motive for keeping “white” attached to Zimmerman’s racial identity was to make the killing of Trayvon out to be an act of “racism.” For them, you see, white and racism are one and the same. That explains why they, and their like-minded birds of a feather, took to equating the killing of Trayvon Martin with the KKK’s murder of Emmett Till. It also explains why they resorted to the desperate extreme of insinuating that any white person who challenged them, such as Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Mark Levin, Michael Reagan and so on, are associate members of the Ku Klux Klan.
To back up the allegation that “racism” murdered Trayvon Martin, the race hustlers argued that, but for the black demand for it, George Zimmerman would have faced no trial at all. True enough, but the reason for that truth is that, originally, the Zimmerman case was a “Stand your Ground” case, that is, before it was made into a race case.
Tavis Smiley’s utterly gross assertion that Trayvon’s death is proof of white Americans’ “incontrovertible contempt” for black Americans is refuted by the observable fact of blacks at the top of this country’s political power structure. Blacks also hold major positions of management in private sector businesses and are successful entrepreneurs. President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, Neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson, “Media Mogal” billionaire Oprah Winfrey and many others come to mind.
In today’s America, there is no white-race “contempt” for blacks that, by any stretch of the most elastic imagination, is remotely comparable to the heydays of slavery. Indeed, coming forward through the horrific history of that “peculiar institution,” there were always whites who supported blacks in the struggle for freedom — sometimes, at their own peril. During the Selma to Montgomery march, and other black protest movements throughout the 1960s, many whites marched arm-in-arm with blacks. For that reason, three “civil rights volunteers” — Viola Luizzo, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — suffered the full wrath of the Ku Klux Klan and were murdered. These and other white supporters of blacks – back to and beyond Abraham Lincoln – mean nothing to the race hustlers.
It is true that there are still wrinkles in the relationship between blacks and whites. The improvements made, however, are so conspicuously self-evident that only an act of self-imposed blindness would keep one from seeing them. Obviously, the race hustlers don’t see them and, obviously, their blindness is self-imposed.
The race hustlers are a gang of always-angry blacks whose only interest in the issue of race is tearing open the wound of slavery to bleed it for guilt-money and power over others. Their ultimate goal is to return America back to the bad old days of racial polarization. We’ve been there; seen that; done that. Those of us of racial goodwill must not allow those whose thinking is stuck in the past to intimidate us into repeating that history.
Orlin Trone is an occasional columnist for the LVN.