Letting the racist cat out of the bag: The Zimmerman family shows its spots
by digby
Do you remember when George Zimmerman's brother emerged last fall to great reviews, saying that his family was not racist and that George had been unfairly tarred as one for the killing of Trayvon Martin? The Orlando Sentinel reported:
Zimmerman's family felt it was time to become more vocal about their multicultural heritage to rebut the charges of racism that have mischaracterized who they are, Zimmerman said to members of the Central Florida chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
"At the beginning we couldn't speak publicly to the media to defend ourselves against the allegations that we are family of racists and that George is a racist," Zimmerman said in Spanish. "We didn't grow up with racism. We grew up with a Latino mother and white Father. Theirs was an interracial love story."
First of all, the idea that because someone comes from an interracial background they can't possibly be racist is silly. All humans have that capability and in our culture African Americans have most often been the target of racism from people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. In fact, the right wing has made quite a profit at fomenting resentments among all racial minorities.
But I think this probably clears up any misconceptions. Robert Zimmerman Jr, the brother tweeted this over the week-end:
On Saturday, Zimmerman went on a Twitter tirade against “black teens,” equating the boy killed by his brother with De’Marquise Elkins, the 17-year-old suspect in the murder of a Georgia infant.
As highlighted by Mediaite, Zimmerman tweeted a photo comparison between Elkins and Martin flipping their middle fingers with the caption, “A picture speaks a thousand words…Any questions?”
Zimmerman tweeted the photo at Michael Moore, the NAACP, the NRA, and a Breitbart.com editor. He followed it up with another comparison between the two, tweeting “Teen to West: “Do you want me to shoot your baby?” #TrayvonMartin to #GeorgeZimmerman: You’re gonna die tonight Motherf**ker.”
In case the reason for his comparison of the two young black men was unclear, Zimmerman later tweeted:
I think this is the perfect illustration of a certain common form of racism that still exists today. I'm sure the Zimmermans don't think of themselves as racists. They just think they are exercising common sense. It's the "fear" that exists in the psyches of those who know, somewhere deep down, that African Americans have a right to be angry and violent about all the terrible things you think about them. And so they assume they all are angry and violent, even when they are just average 17 year old American kids out buying some skittles on a rainy night.
.
