Shelby Steele: what the Zimmerman case says about today’s civil rights establishment
In an excellent article (please read the whole thing), Shelby Steele writes:
In the Zimmerman/Martin case the civil-rights establishment is fighting for the poetic truth that white animus toward blacks is still such that a black teenager””Skittles and ice tea in hand””can be shot dead simply for walking home. But actually this establishment is fighting to maintain its authority to wield poetic truth””the authority to tell the larger society how it must think about blacks, how it must respond to them, what it owes them and, then, to brook no argument.
The Zimmerman/Martin tragedy has been explosive because it triggered a fight over authority. Who gets to say what things mean””the supporters of George Zimmerman, who say he acted in self-defense, or the civil-rights establishment that says he profiled and murdered a black child? Here we are. And where is the authority to resolve this? The six-person Florida jury, looking carefully at the evidence, decided that Mr. Zimmerman pulled the trigger in self-defense and not in a fury of racial hatred.
And here, precisely at the point of this verdict, is where all of America begins to see this hollowed-out civil-rights establishment slip into pathos. Almost everyone saw this verdict coming. It is impossible to see how this jury could have applied the actual law to this body of evidence and come up with a different conclusion. The civil-rights establishment’s mistake was to get ahead of itself, to be seduced by its own poetic truth even when there was no evidence to support it. And even now its leaders call for a Justice Department investigation, and they long for civil lawsuits to be filed””hoping against hope that some leaf of actual racial victimization will be turned over for all to see. This is how a once-great social movement looks when it becomes infested with obsolescence.
And not just obsolescence, or even mediocrity. The civil rights movement today is infested with corruption and shameless mendacity in the pursuit of perpetuating its leaders’ own power. Voluntarily giving up power is hard and seldom done.
For those who don’t know who Shelby Steele is, here’s his bio. I’ve only read some of his articles, not his books, but he’s written quite a few, mostly on the subject of race relations, including this one entitled White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, which looks especially interesting right about now.
Note that a lot of my posts have either directly or indirectly dealt with issues of race ever since the Zimmerman trial. That’s not historically been one of my main topics on this blog, although I see from my “categories” list that so far I’ve written 157 posts on the topic (this one should be the 158th). Some people may think that writing so much about race right now is a distraction from the real issues: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, Obamacare, immigration, the economy, the Middle East, and all the rest. My answer? I’ve already written tons on those topics, and I have never neglected them nor do I plan to do so. The Zimmerman case has for the moment spotlighted a whole host of festering problems that trouble this country greatly, and which affect not just George Zimmerman or Trayvon Martin and their families, or even black people, but the nation as a whole: the law of self-defense, Second Amendment rights, the growing power of the liberal/left wing of the Democratic Party, the shameless manipulation of public opinion with the full cooperation of the MSM, the economy, and the social fabric that supports the family and child-rearing. And that’s just for starters; you can probably think of more.
I read it yesterday – one of the other blogs that I follow linked to it. I think he hits very close to home – that the contemporary civil rights advocates are simultaneously harking back to the noble past, and bitterly regretting the rejection of their moral authority by the jury in the Zimmerman trial.
I mean, it must absolutely sting – so that is why poor George Zimmerman must be absolutely reviled.
The aspect of it which utterly floors me is how every single thing about the Zimmerman-Martin encounter which was put about at first in the national media was simply not true. Every one of the details first put about was not true – and disproven by the trial testimony – and yet the electronic lynch mob is still insisting on them.
Sad, really. For everybody.
I keep wondering if all of these scandals and this racial animus isn’t the beginning of the end of 100 years of expanding progressive influence. In the past century it was easier to compartmentalize a message and restrict its distribution and as the left gained control of the media the messages supporting its narrative were propagated while others were left to die a local or regional death (or to paraphrase Kolnai, to evaporate into the Ether of Decayed Knowledge).
Are the Zimmerman fixation and the lack of attention to the IRS scandal by the left finally revealing to low-information voters what most of us here have know for quite some time—that the left’s hollow sanctimonious facade of moral and cultural superiority has collapsed?
The progressive call to revisit stand-your-ground laws seems to be gaining no traction (nor does it have legal precedence); it seems more and more to be a quixotic demand of race hustlers and gun control activists. Conversely, the IRS scandal, slowly seems to be gaining traction, the left’s attempts at justification and distraction notwithstanding.
Detroit, another example, while cited by Progressive apologists to be the result of parsimonious Republican policies and “white flight,” is recognized even by many liberal democrats as a failue of the Blue Social Model (h/t Walter Russell Mead).
I don’t yet know where this is going. I don’t see this as immediately ushering in a new lifetime of overwhelming conservative or libertarian influence. Last century’s Progressivism will live on, although I hope only in epigonic fashion and with its claim to any credibility essentially destroyed.
Add ‘white privilege’ and ‘social justice’ to the list of issues raised by the Zimmerman trial.
neo said ” Some people may think that writing so much about race right now is a distraction from the real issues: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, Obamacare, immigration, the economy, the Middle East, and all the rest. ”
Ok, I’m guilty as charged.
But this was a great post. It gets to the heart of the matter about the source of all the frustration and anger directed about this verdict.
Andrew Klavan also has a nice, succinct post worth reading. He’s blunt and spot on, adding a big helping of sarcasm in an essay called “A National Conversation about Complete Crap”. A short read, but it asks a similar question – who is qualified to talk about race, and who appointed these people on behalf of their respective races to be the spokespersons?
http://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/2013/07/22/national-conversation-about-complete-crap/
Southpaw,
A good, quick spot-on read.
You’re question “. . . who is qualified to talk about race, and who appointed these people on behalf of their respective races to be the spokespersons?”
Reminds me of the complaint about nanny Mayor Bloomberg: “When did Bloomberg become my mother?”
I can’t help but notice some parallels between the Zimmerman case and the Boston Massacre of 1770. The British soldiers were assaulted by a mob and fired into the mob in self defense, most of the shooters were fully acquitted, with a couple being charged with manslaughter but no jail time. In the aftermath, the revolutionary propagandists went into overdrive against the British, and this incident is regarded as one of the first that led to the war with England.
You wonder whether the race baiters in the aftermath of the Zimmerman verdict are trying to brew up a war of their own–a race war.
“the social fabric that supports the family and child-rearing.”
This is what Zimmerman represents. However, I would broaden “family and child-rearing” to all the vulnerable, such as the elderly and disabled, of the community who depend on the care and vigilance of their neighbors, especially in insecure conditions.
lacune, America as a nation was founded by activists who played the Marxist game before we called it the Marxist game. The Marxist game has always been America’s game and, really, the only political game there is.
The race hustlers are going to beat the race drum until it quits working. It deflects the observation that most black problems are self inflicted. African born immigrants have more education, less unemployment, and lower poverty levels than native born African Americans. It ain’t race. It ain’t color.
It’s not white boys who are impregnating black girls. It’s not white folks who are dropping out of high school. It’s not white boys who are shooting blacks boys in the big cities.
What would Trayvon Martin be doing for a living in five years had he survived? My guess is not much.
That’s what the race baiters should be working on.
“The civil rights movement today is infested with corruption and shameless mendacity in the pursuit of perpetuating its leaders’ own power.”
That corruption and mendacity and perpetuating of power is true of essentially all groups that hunker under the Democrat’s big umbrella. Includes greens, feminists, public unions, pigmented minorities, trial lawyers, Federal employees. the non-working class. A pity that the Repubs are not better in opposition, and under Rience Priebus and Maverick McCain are engaged in their own mendacity to these same groups.
What is that awful smell? It is the rotting carcass of the American Republic.
While I have been accused of over-simplifying things, which is true to a point. My take on this is about narrative. If it doesn’t fit the narrative, facts may be modified, changed, omitted and just made up. If it doesn’t fit, you must make it, to paraphrase a “Dream Team” attorney.
I kind of doubt the leaders are harking back. I thihk they’re using the fading aura to fool the chumps.
Works.
There is a very real fear that anyone of us might become a Zimmerman. Given the times, it wouldn’t take much for us to find ourselves under attack by the aligned power of the local, state, and federal government. To the extent that we are silenced and don’t respond to threats and intimidation the leftist and race hustlers have won.
“African born immigrants have more education, less unemployment, and lower poverty levels than native born African Americans. ”
That’s the truth. I work with one such person, and he has very little patience with the whining that occurs among the American blacks. It’s really funny to see the dislocation and shock among liberal academics when he does not go along with what they expect every black person to think.
Neo, I believe that the race situation in the country is worth writing about. It is important.
With Barack Obama’s blessing, and stimulation, the race industry is beating the drum for confrontation. However, this time the docile white population may have had enough. If Whites really start fighting back as a coherent group, who knows where it could lead?
Kaba makes a valid point. It should be clear to anyone that you can become the target of the race industry, and their political and media accomplices in a heartbeat. It doesn’t take a gun. A traffic accident or some other reasonably innocent occurrence will do. Of course you can become a physical target by just being the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I don’t care what people talk about. So long as they begin to learn how to hate the Left, the rest will solve itself in due time.
Americans should care about this issue because the Left derives a significant chunk of their shock troops and money from urban black communities.
When you fight a war, are you just going to ignore where the enemy gets their troops and munitions from?
Oldflyer,
Whites are split on the Zimmerman controversy. The Left has folded in issues besides race that white liberals plug into, if race isn’t enough for them. And race is enough for the whites who are PC cultists.
The Borg is not so easily cleaved.
The group that the Right needs to champion in the Zimmerman controversy isn’t whites, though the majority of the group is white. The Right needs to rally the working middle class.
There is a deep nostalgia among certain elements of black leadership for the clarity and simplicity of “the movement.” So what if Trayvon clearly is not Rosa Parks and Zimmerman isn’t even white. (The Canadians would call him a “visible minority” and he’d probably get stopped in Arizona.)
They have to scream loudly to divert your attention away from the fact that there’s absolutely no there there and that they have no tangible solution for the real ailments of black America. How can they solve a problem they basically refuse to acknowledge?
Speaking about Leftist movements, there was something I wrote to you in an older thread, Eric, that you may have missed.
http://neoneocon.com/2013/07/18/the-fbi-orders/#comment-632299
Shelby Steele: “One wants to scream at all those outraged at the Zimmerman verdict: Where is your outrage over the collapse of the black family? Today’s civil-rights leaders swat at mosquitoes like Zimmerman when they have gorillas on their back. Seventy-three percent of all black children are born without fathers married to their mothers. And you want to bring the nation to a standstill over George Zimmerman?
There are vast career opportunities, money and political power to be gleaned from the specter of Mr. Zimmerman as a racial profiler/murderer; but there is only hard and selfless work to be done in tackling an illegitimacy rate that threatens to consign blacks to something like permanent inferiority. If there is anything good to be drawn from the Zimmerman/Martin tragedy, it is only the further revelation of the corruption and irrelevance of today’s civil-rights leadership.”
Bravo!!
As in the old statement, “Physician, heal thyself,” so must the black community heal itself. It won’t be easy. And, unfortunately, the white community is following along. White single motherhood is increasing. Yet, if you suggest that all this free sex and nickel beer is not such a good thing, you are denigrated as a racist/Nazi/homophobe/Neanderthal/etc. But they don’t listen to Shelby Steele or Thomas Sowell, or Walter Williams, or Clarence Thomas, or any of the blacks who are telling it like it is.
We have, as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Defined deviancy down.” The libertarian in me wants to see tolerance for human differences in society, but there is too much evidence that intact families get better results in raising children. If single motherhood showed any promise in that regard, I would endorse it. Similarly, if acting like a victim of some “other” produced better results, I would endorse that. But they don’t work and only the black community can save themselves from these anchors around their necks.
Ymarsakar,
The youth brigade plus professor brigade plus outside help, plus process and institutional barriers.
Fun is undergrads maneuvering against grad students and law professors.
You know, at no point was there a student organization dedicated to ROTC advocacy on campus, although several student groups were instrumental, including groups started concurrently that were designed to be instrumental, but not direct. Instead, various student groups, various students, many who had no group affiliation or formal leadership position, and various professors and alumni contributed as needed. The structure was loose and adaptive. Whatever was needed was provided by a variety of people in a variety of ways.
To answer your question, the only ones I’ve seen try to play the game is the Tea Party movement, and they’re hardly proof of an unbeatable Left. They’re just proof of what happens when you don’t bring activists to an activist fight.
Correction: I should have said there was at no point an officially recognized ROTC advocacy student organization on campus, the campus equivalent of legal incorporation. There were, however, unofficial ad hoc committees that formed and disbanded and served as planning and organizing nodes.
JJ: “We have, as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Defined deviancy down.””
I think your Moynihan quote points to the right tack for the Right.
Too many on the Right jump into the Left’s frame.
What the Right should do is reframe with its own narrative that upholds constructive norms and values. Therein, the Left’s position can be cast as a defense of the social dysfunction described by Steele. The contrast needs to be set up, and that won’t happen as long as the Right stays in the Left’s frame. The Right needs to set up its own narrative frame and force the Left to react to it.
Eric @ 11:58 . . .
On an earlier thread, you defined yourself as a “liberal,” but you are clearly a “not-liberal.” I’ve had trouble calling myself a “conservative,” and I believe you do too. We’ve been brainwashed all our lives to fear “conservatives,” “Republicans,” “the Right,” and other non-cool people. That’s why “neo-neocon” was such a nice term during the Iraq War, though it’s meaningless now in 2013.
What I’m saying to you here is, make the jump. Identify yourself as a “not-liberal,” a “tea partier,” etc., whatever works for you.
As Thomas Sowell pointed out in one of his many books, the “left” has defined words so that anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their increasingly insane ideas get tarred with some non-cool brush, such as “the Right.”
Embrace the suck. Be who you are. Dare to abandon the old terms, and stand up for the “narrative frame” that most of us neo-neocon readers have already accepted. We are “former liberals.” We aren’t “the Right.” We’re people who believe in common sense, limited government, and the basic ideas of the U.S. Constitution.
Unfortunately, there is no adequate word to describe us because the Left has gained the high ground in the battle for words.
I’m just speaking personally to you because of your self-identification as a “liberal,” and I know you need to make that final mental leap to accept the fact that you’re a “former liberal.”
Promethea: The word is American.
Cheers!
today as vs the pst Honesty
Eric: “The Right needs to set up its own narrative frame and force the Left to react to it.”
The Right has done so. As I mentioned in my comment, the Left responds with ad hominems that seem to work perfectly well.
I have a friend, a long time friend. His career was in sales – insurance, autos and real estate. He worked long and hard to achieve a stable retirement. He lived by conservative values and he’s no dummy. But he falls for the Left’s rhetoric, hook line and sinker. Why? IMO, it’s about their ability to always frame their position as the high moral ground. Whenever we talk about family responsibility, fiscal sanity, low taxes, pro-growth energy policies, or any of the things needed to set the ship aright, they are there with the charges that the Right is racist, anti-common people, anti-environment, and pro the evil money grubbing capitalists. How do we overcome that except by carefully accumulating concrete evidence of the failure of their policies? Where I see the Right going wrong is in their open pursuit of political advantage. (Even though it is necessary.) Trying to make Obama responsible for all the failings isn’t working. He is the Teflon Man. We should just understand that and go for the substance of the failings and connecting them to Progressive/Statist policies. Obamacare is certainly one example. Quit trying to assign blame to Obama. He isn’t running for anything. And he didn’t write that atrocious mess. It was written by Reid/Pelosi and a bunch of medical lobbyists. The democrats got it passed (barely) and it is their steaming pile of dung. Even my old friend recognizes that it is a mess. But he doesn’t want to blame Obama for it. See what I mean?
They’re just proof of what happens when you don’t bring activists to an activist fight.
That doesn’t answer the central question. How would you have beat the ATF, Obama’s Regime, Eric Holder’s IRS, and various other organizations in the Tea Party’s “activist” shoes?
You say the Tea Party failed due to an incomplete or incompetent application of Marxist activism, did you not.
But he doesn’t want to blame Obama for it.
Hostages and women in domestic abuse relationships also don’t want to blame certain people.
While difficult to get them out of the brainwash effect of the cult, it is not impossible. However, doing so will require something beyond politics or even activism.
If a person’s free will is damaged, “reason” doesn’t particularly work very well. Propaganda, psychological control, however is just as effective, if not more so, for a “damaged” person.
How damaged is that damaged person? Is he just a human that makes mistakes in judgment or has he been reduced to a slave or even to a mere tool that does as he is told, with no will of his own?
Ymarsakar.
The fundamental error made by the Tea Party was to prioritize elected office over the ground game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEIU
Enemy roster checks.
President – Mary Kay Henry
We don’t hear much about them, do we, these powers behind the throne, the shadow dwellers.
Republicans can’t fight people they can’t even name. Those Who Shall Not Be Named in America. Zimmerman, of course, is named and targeted, precisely because being in the light will burn away the shadows. They were planning on burning away the flesh and the soul too, but that didn’t go as well as their 100,000 other victims in the past few years.
JJ,
Repetition and persistent reinforcing presence matters.
Be the subject or else they’ll objectify you.
Promethea,
Liberals can be anti-Marxist.