Headline of the Day

[Content Note: Racism; eliminationist violence.]

Care of the Orlando Sentinel: FBI interviews: No evidence Zimmerman a racist.

Federal civil-rights investigators interviewed dozens of George Zimmerman's friends, neighbors and co-workers, and no one said he was a racist, records released Thursday show.

LOL! Case closed!

First of all, whether a person's "friends, neighbors, and co-workers" will say zie is racist is absolutely irrelevant to determining whether that person is actually racist, no less whether zie committed a racist hate crime.

There are a lot of people who know me who would say I am not a racist, but guess what? I am. I don't want to be, and I make a serious effort to examine internal prejudices and check my white privilege, but that doesn't erase the fact that I am a human sponge who was socialized in a culture steeped in racism and continue to be bombarded with messages exhorting me to privilege whiteness and treat POC as less than every day of my fucking life.

Was George Zimmerman raised on a different planet? If not, he's probably a racist, too.

The question is whether he acted on that internalized racism. What evidence of that might there be? Well, offhand, murdering a black teenage boy might be a clue.

Chris Serino, the police detective who interviewed Zimmerman the night of the shooting, told agents he thought Zimmerman had pursued Trayvon "based on his attire" and not "skin color."

Ah, the old hoodie chestnut again. But would Zimmerman have killed me if he'd seen me walking down the street wearing a hoodie and carrying a soda and Skittles? Probably not. So maybe he's just a sexist. Except I suspect Zimmerman wouldn't have killed Iain, either. So maybe he's just an ageist. Except I suspect that Zimmerman wouldn't have killed Justin Bieber, or any of the millions of white teenaged boys who looks very much like him.

And if George Zimmerman wouldn't have reported, stalked, and killed a white teenage boy who he first noticed walking down the street minding his own business while wearing a hoodie and carrying a soda and Skittles, but did kill Trayvon Martin, well, I think we all know that "attire" isn't the goddamn issue.