4 Unhinged, Offensive Reactions to the Zimmerman Verdict

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She goes on to evoke the protection of white women rhetoric that was once used to justify lynchings:

Picture Zimmerman’s neighbor Olivia Bertalan, a defense witness, hiding in her locked bedroom with her infant and a pair of rusty scissors while two young males, later identified as African American, burglarized her home. They ran when police arrived.

Parker concludes that, "if we are honest, we know that human nature includes the accumulation of evolved biases based on experience and survival. In the courtroom, it’s called profiling. In the real world, it’s called common sense.” In the real world, actually, racial profiling is an ineffective tool that applies behavior among a minority of a group to an entire people. Rather than allow police -- or vigilantes -- to zero-in on real criminals, racial profiling wastes time and resources assuming everyone whose skin is dark is a criminal. Of course, this kind of reckless policing comes at a cost, not only to law enforcement, but particularly to the Black communities treated as if they are guilty until proven innocent. In New York City, the racial profiling tool stop-and-frisk has increased exponentially (more than 600% under Mayor Michael Bloomberg), and while so many young, Black men are felt-up in public, hassled, humiliated, and sometimes arrested for the color of their skin, shootings have remained stable.

3. David Sirota

Over at the left-leaning website Salon, columnist David Sirota has continued his well-known appropriation with an article linking the killing of Trayvon Martin to drone strikes in Yemen. "Zimmerman’s presumption of guilt and his subsequent actions mimic those of his own government, and therefore reflect a larger attitudinal shift in the nation at large," says Sirota, who goes onto compare the vigilante killer to Obama. "Whereas Zimmerman told non-emergency responders that Martin ' looks like he’s up to no good,' the New York Times reported that Obama’s  indiscriminate drone bombing, which 'counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants,' presumes that people in a targeted area are ' probably up to no good.' In other words, when it comes to military policy, the Obama administration is George Zimmerman perceiving the world as filled with Trayvon Martins supposedly 'up to no good' — and who supposedly therefore deserve to die."

Considering the racial undertones applied to the president here, it is worth noting that it was actually counterterrorism officials the New York Times quoted, not Obama. In any event, Black Twitter responded to the piece with a full affront of criticism for Sirota's failure to understand how the presumed criminality of Black men in America is linked to a history of racism and enslavement completely separate from the government's foreign policy and more recent War on Terror.  Bloggers, tweeters, and pundits called Sirota out for recklessly appropriatiing a tragedy to elevate his own schtick, thus ignoring history while belittling Martin's death and denying Martin and the victims who really are like him the thoughtful commentary they deserve. Sirota responded to accusations of insensitivity by "whitesplaining" his critics, sending Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes to renowned Black intellectuals like Elon James White.  Rather than accept critcism and honestly consider why his analysis were offensive and tone-deaf, Sirota insisted that the people of color coming at him are too privileged or uninformed to understand his analogy. It was, over all, an epic fail, storified here and here. 

4. Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter also joined in on the post-verdict grave-stomping, telling WXIA "the jury made the right decision based in the evidence presented," and opined that he does not believe race -- just "evidence" -- affected their decision.  Carter made his own race problems even more clear when he compared peaceful protests that swept the nation to "race riots" following the LAPD's brutal beating of Rodney King.