Michael, the fact that I have adopted the role of a gadfly to mask very deep seated levels of emotional pain sometimes deliberately obfuscates my intent of getting my viewers to think, as well as the price I pay for the struggles I have in my need for legitimacy, desperate to de-marginalize, (un-marginalize?) as I have been for a significant length of time in my uneven bid for matriculation, but let me take on the raw wound of George Zimmerman, not as an adjudicated legal debate, nor even how it is viewed strictly along the lines of ethnic perception, but as a personal narrative that points to the complexity of lack of answers:
At the risk of her sons ostracizing me along with the rest of my family, I know my paternal aunt feels that Zimmerman was justified in murdering Trayvon, and I find her attitude horrific. Diminished as I may be through my admission of bigotry, I do not like stacked decks, and even under my aunt's rationale, if Trayvon was a troubled juvenile, he did not deserve the summary execution that Zimmerman's actions provoked. My aunt's attitude reflects the reality of my family's need for boundaries of the type that existed before Johnson managed to get civil rights legislation passed, reflects the difference between my white Catholic/Methodist/Jewish family and African Americans, even that of my mother's sister, with her PhD in education leadership. Over the dinner table, in her discussion of pedagogy and the Philadelphia school district, she says, "Who wants to deal with that?" As you have a background in speech writing, I am sure you can infer her meaning.
I, as a disabled woman, have had to deal with that, since my parents institutionalized me in Home of the Merciful Savior, from the time I was nine years old: I was sexually abused by minority internees I lived with, and by the orderlies who attended to my personal needs, and then I was assaulted by my mentally ill mother's lovers, was a matriculated out cast in high school, pretty much the same during my active university years, and then exposed myself to a genocidal third world subsistence level of poverty in North Philadelphia, nearly lost my life once to a drug addict there, and what I have sustained in the years since is none the less horrific as the bullet on which Trayvon bled to death. It is even worse for developmentally disabled and black. Danieal is dead despite all the DHS and disability services within Philadephia combined, not only because she was voiceless, but worthless by this city's standards. The fact that I was of an affluent well educated family protected me from Danieal's end of life starvation, but only up to a point.
I hate urban African American norms, and it is a hatred learned through the observation of inner city devaluation of their own lives. I hate the depreciation and the fatalism of those norms, and the bigoted narrow mindedness of the working class who cannot even read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I have had the text thrown back in my face as a near implied accusation because I dared to use great minority achievements in literature as a starting point for discussion. Have you yourself ventured much beyond K street, gotten your hands dirty, ignoring your own affluence and demeanor, waded into the hood so you can be accused of paternalism for trying to reach out to a black boy under threat?
Obama is not a miracle. He is a multi-faceted exception who has the same symbolic level of helplessness as the titular ADAPT activist who has left me hung out to dry because I keep trying to build bridges back to the ambulatory world you inhabit.
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