Black life doesn't hold so much value in the region Trayvon was killed

Trayvon Martin had it coming ...

by Gary Gibson

We read those words to that effect from an article linked to by a libertarian website we visit very regularly.

"In Zimmerman's case, Martin was an athletic six-foot-two-inch tall football player that had him on his back pounding on him. Martin got what he deserved."

So wrote Paul Huebl, a former Chicago cop and proud member of the Screen Actors Guild.

We've tried to avoid having to write anything publicly about the shooting of Trayvon Martin. But we feel we must let our thoughts be known, if only in passing...

You see, dear patron, we spent a few years of our adolescence in the Central Florida town just south of where Trayvon was killed. We have some experience with being Black in that corner of the world.

Further, the public voices who dwell close to our philosophical sphere seem to be saying some questionable things in their rush to defend gun ownership and denounce sleazy race-baiters like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

Like Thomas Sowell, the black conservative and intellectual who agreed with Geraldo Rivera's advice to black and Hispanic youth to not dress to look so threatening.

First a few things about that part of Florida...

Like Caesar's Gaul, Florida is divided into three unofficial parts...

South Florida as centered around the Miami-Dade metro area is essentially a continental Latin and Caribbean colony.

Central Florida is dominated of course by Orlando. It's a bloodless and its claim to fame is a tourist trap ruled over by a mouse created by a Nazi-sympathizer.

People often say that Florida isn't really "The South". And they're right. But North Florida isn't really part of Florida as much as it is the southernmost region of Georgia.

Once you head north of Orlando, the descendants of Castro-generated refugees and Jewish retirees become a distant spectacle. Much more immediate are the Confederate flags, monster trucks and occasional white supremacist tattoo.

Geneva, Florida, is just a few miles north of Orlando and a few miles east of Sanford, Florida, where George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin to death.

Through a series of crises and accidents your editor came to spend his early teen years as a resident of Geneva. The town is home to just a couple thousand souls or so. The downtown has a section full of older homes, a section of newer tract homes (where your editor lived), three churches, an elementary school, a couple of gas stations, one post office, one feed store and one stoplight.

The rest of the place is a smattering of multi-acre properties, dirt roads and swamp.

While Sanford is east of Geneva, Oviedo, FL, is just south and to the west. Oviedo is a very nice, suburb of Orlando. It made at least one "100 Best to Live in the U.S." list one year. The road from Oviedo becomes Geneva's First Street. There is a specific moment as you travel along that road that you sense you've crossed some ethereal veil. It happens within a second or two of leaving the "Welcome to Oviedo" sign behind.

The new, colorful subdivisions stop abruptly. Wide open pasture dotted takes their place. Tiny herds of cattle and the occasional horse or two alternate with lone houses in big fields as you drive along.

You notice more pickup trucks, quite a few of them on giant tires. The few other cars you see on the two-lane road move more aggressively.

Twenty years ago when your editor's mother bought one of those newer tract homes, one of the neighbors painted "NO NIGER" in huge red letters on her garage door. We assume he meant "NO NIGGER", but we also assume it was also dark when he wrote it and he lost track of how many g's he'd already written.

A few months later someone left a pathetic attempt at a chemical bomb on the front porch of our family's house. Our mother called the sheriff. The deputies told her that had the bomb worked, it might have killed her.

That was all over twenty years ago. But just a few years ago the brother of the other black Caribbean family in town was carrying his young son on his shoulders when he was run over by one of our neighbors.

The brother and his son survived with only minimal injury. The neighbor went to jail for a long time. The attack was racially motivated.

Back in January, 2010 we were visiting the old homestead, we were accidentally hit by a speeding truck as we walked along the road just beyond our mother's house. The hit was surely accidental. It was the response of everyone involved that made us mad. And reminded us what the life of a black man is worth in that town.

The asked us angrily what we were doing "in the middle of the road" as we lay moaning on the lawn where we'd landed. The owner of the home also seemed mad that we had landed on his lawn and created trouble for the driver. Once we recovered our senses and realized that we were neither dead nor crippled, a fight very nearly ensued.

To heap even more insult to our relatively minor injuries, the emergency crew who came out (at our mother's insistence, not our own) seemed annoyed at us, too.

We never lived in neighboring Sanford itself. But we spent an awful lot of time there. On the way to the city itself from Geneva, there is a little "Chocolate Village” called appropriately enough Midway. A poor black neighborhood in the middle of nowhere. Out of the 1700 or so people who live there 1600 are black while only a few dozen are white.

Sanford itself is a much bigger town with over 50,000 residents. Over half of those are white and a little less than a third black. The black population is largely concentrated in the Goldsborough neighborhood.

Sanford's neck isn't quite as red as Geneva's, but the there is still that uniquely Southern flavor of black-white tension on the air. Your editor can taste it every time he lands at Orlando International Airport. It increases the farther north you go from the airport and from Orlando. You could choke on it in Geneva. It's not as bad in Sanford, but it's still there.

Here's an anecdote not from personal experience, but culled from the Wikipedia page on Sanford:

"On October 23, 1945, the Brooklyn Dodgers announced that they had signed Jackie Robinson assigning him to their International League team, the Montreal Royals.

"Branch Rickey, Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager believing he 'knew' Florida, thought his team could train there ruffling as few feathers as possible. Robinson and his wife were instructed by Rickey not to try to stay at any Sanford hotels. He and his wife didn't eat out at any restaurants not deemed 'Negro restaurants.' He didn't even dress in the same locker room as his teammates.

"As soon as the citizenry became aware of Robinson's presence, the mayor of Sanford was confronted by a 'large group of white residents' who 'demanded that Robinson...be run out of town.'

"On March 5th, 1946, the Royals were informed that they would not be permitted to take the field as an integrated group. Rickey was concerned for Robinson's life and sent him to stay in Daytona Beach. His daughter, Sharon Robinson, remembered being told, 'The Robinsons were run out of Sanford, Florida, with threats of violence.'"

"In his 1993 book, 'A Hard Road to Glory: A History Of The African American Athlete: Baseball' tennis great Arthur Ashe wrote in response, Rickey 'moved the entire Dodger pre-season camp from Sanford, Florida, to Daytona Beach due to the oppressive conditions of Sanford.'"
Source

We share these anecdotes so you understand our bias. Black life doesn't hold so much value in the region Trayvon was killed. And we sadly report that it doesn't have much value in the eyes of people with whom we tend to agree on other things like liberty and the right to bear arms.

It saddens us to be on the side of the national healthcare types on this one. Even if Trayvon got violent with Zimmerman...even if Zimmerman was getting the worst of it in a scuffle...he was the aggressor. He gave Trayvon reason to feel the need to defend himself. Zimmerman was the one "acting suspiciously."

(Zimmerman also strikes us a low-IQ thug who admired authoritarian power and made up for his inadequacies by carrying a gun. But we don't know the man personally and could be wrong.)

Lest you get us wrong, we believe in the right to bear arms to be as essential as the right to own property and to do as you will with your own body. We also believe in the absolute right to self defense and to stop violence toward your person and property with force.

But that doesn't mean you get to create the situation in which you have to defend yourself.

Had Trayvon or any other black man behaved as Zimmerman had toward a white person...if a white man had been beating on then been shot by a black man who had been shadowing him...That is to say, if the races of the actors had been reversed, then the gun rights crowd would be singing the opposite tune.

They would have decried the black man for stalking the white man in the first place. They would have cheered the white man for pummeling his black stalker. They would have called for justice for the fallen white man and for the imprisonment and even death of the black shooter.

We write none of this to accuse or even to lament. We merely give you the reality of the racial situation in the area, along with an interpretation of the events born of having lived there.

We also write this as a warning.

Racial tension is still very real in this country. Racial violence and race-based urban riots are as imminent a threat as war with Iran...or the collapse of the currency...

We've warned before that proximity to pockets of welfare-dependence should be a serious consideration for anyone preparing for the "fat tail" events we write about. Sadly, urban welfare society is correlated strongly with race. And human relationships tend to fracture along ethnic lines when times get very hard.

If you're going to stick around in the U.S. as times get more interesting, then make sure you arm yourself with the best information you possibly can to stay out of trouble's way.