Message to Zimmerman: Black Like Me

In case you missed it, Jonathan Capehart shared a letter to George Zimmerman from a Facebook post from Alex Fraser. Jonathan said he heard about the letter when Steve Harvey read it on his show and he wrote a column in the Washington Post about it.

Here's Alex Fraser's "Message to Zimmerman":

Dear George Zimmerman,

For the rest of your life you are now going to feel what its like to be a black man in America.

You will feel people stare at you. Judging you for what you think are unfair reasons. You will lose out on getting jobs for something you feel is outside of your control. You will believe yourself to be an upstanding citizen and wonder why people choose to not see that.

People will cross the street when they see you coming. They will call you hurtful names. It will drive you so insane some days that you’ll want to scream at the top of your lungs. But you will have to wake up the next day, put on firm look and push through life.

I bet you never thought that by shooting a black male you’d end up inheriting all of his struggles.

Enjoy your “freedom.”

Sincerely,

A black male who could’ve been Trayvon Martin

You also can read the Facebook post and comments with the link on Jonathan Capehart's column.

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New Year-A Day Too Late: Fruitvale Station

Writer/Director Ryan Coogle's debut film "Fruitvale Station" hits the theatres on Friday, July 26, 2013. The film's Producer is Academy Award Winner Forest Whitaker. It's the true story of Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old Bay Area resident, as he crosses paths with his friends, enemies,family and strangers on the last day of 2008, his last day of life. Oscar Grant is a father, brother, lover, and son who resolves "to be better" in each of these roles in the coming year.

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Wisconsin Man Guilty of Killing Teen Neighbor

A Milwaukee man knew exactly what he was doing when he accused his teenage neighbor of burglary and then fired a bullet into the boy's chest, jurors decided Friday. The verdict essentially guarantees that 76-year-old John Henry Spooner will die behind bars.

The same jury decided two days earlier that Spooner was guilty of first-degree intentional homicide in the death of 13-year-old Darius Simmons in May 2012. The trial then shifted into a second phase in which jurors were asked to determine whether Spooner was mentally ill at the moment he pulled the trigger.

It took the jury less than 30 minutes to agree he was sane and in control of his actions at the time of the shooting.

The boy's mother, Patricia Larry, declined to speak with reporters after the trial but thanked God, the prosecutor and the community. Her son had died in her arms.

"Justice was served," she said.

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Sen. Rand Paul and the "Southern Avenger"

 

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul says he’s standing by longtime aide Jack Hunter whom he appointed as his Media Director.

 

“Sen. Paul holds his staff to a standard that includes treating every individual with equal protection and respect, without exception,” spokeswoman Moira Bagley said in a statement.

 

Jack Hunter has for years been a provocative talk radio host who called himself the “Southern Avenger.” Before that, he was a member of the League of the South, a group that advocates Southern secession.

For years, Hunter wore a Mexican wrestling mask made out of the Confederate flag. “The whole idea of the Southern Avenger was to be an anonymous superhero,” he explained in a 2011 article in the Charleston City Paper, where he writes a column. Hunter ditched the mask in 2007, when he moved from being a guest on a local music station to talk radio.

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Mass Incarceration: "The New Jim Crow"

In her new book "The New Jim Crow", Michelle Alexander argues vigorously and persuasively that "[w]e have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." Jim Crow and legal racial segregation has been replaced by mass incarceration as "a system of social control". She reviews American racial history from the colonies to the Clinton administration, delineating its transformation into the "war on drugs.

She offers an acute analysis of the effect of this mass incarceration upon former inmates "who will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives, denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits." Most provocatively, she reveals how both the move toward colorblindness and affirmative action may blur our vision of injustice: "most Americans know and don't know the truth about mass incarceration"—but her carefully researched, deeply engaging, and thoroughly readable book should change that.

Michelle currently holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University. Michelle served for several years as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, and subsequently directed the Civil Rights Clinics at Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor. She is a former law clerk of Justice Harry Blackmun of the U. S. Supreme Court.

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Lessons From the Zimmerman Verdict

The killing of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent verdict of not guilty has thrown the nation into turmoil. We, the American public, must learn from this tragic situation and take action to ensure changes in our laws and in the public understanding of our racial views, assumptions and beliefs.

Last year in New York City, police stopped 532,911 citizens under their current policy of stop and frisk. Of those stopped, 9.7% were white and 90.3 were non-white. Only 6% of the stops resulted in arrest. Some Americans see nothing wrong with this situation, but many Americans protest these stops as a violation of those citizen's civil rights. Many see Zimmerman's action on the night he killed Trayvon Martin as racial profiling similar to that occurring in New York City.

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