Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 462

On the Pain of Violent Men, or, Why I’m not Sorry about Max and Montle

TRIGGER WARNING: sexual violence

Let me start by saying that I feel very ambivalent about causing two workers to lose their source of income. It makes me uncomfortable to have deprived anyone of a wage in this time of crisis. ‘Getting someone fired’, more than a victory, makes me feel miserable, concerned, confused.

There are a number of other things contributing to my current lack of emotional wellbeing – my anxiety, nausea, vulnerability, unhappiness; a feeling of being overwhelmingly incapable of working or writing or any of the daily activities necessary for my survival. Many of the feelings I am describing are those associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and relate in part to my own past experiences of violent men. While the medicalisation of trauma and ‘post-trauma’ is too complex a discussion for this text, for the sake of brevity I will use this term to refer to the way I have been affected, and am constantly affected, by particular traumas. My PTSD was triggered, that is my feelings of helplessness, victimhood, pain; the feelings of fear associated with sexual violence; trauma, when a friend of mine sent me an email with screenshots of a Facebook thread starting with a status by Max Barashenkov. In her email she asked me to please say or do something about it since she was too scared of the men concerned to do it herself.

The status reads:

I propose correctional rape and sterilization for any white person who twerks.

Immediately two woman friends object to Max’s light, joking reference to correctional rape. Correctional rape is a term used to describe the practice of raping someone (usually a woman) in order to ‘cure’ them of their homosexuality. This is a common practice in South Africa particularly in South African townships.

Max and his friend and former co-writer at For Him Magazine (FHM) South Africa, Montle Moorosi immediately attacked and bullied them:

Montle:

i think rape can be quite fun if executed in a romantic manner. like saying “i love you” before you slip a roofie into her Earl Grey tea.

When challenged on this, Max writes:

i myself, was a victim of correctional rape, so I can make jokes about it

No, Max, you weren’t. Seeing as you are a heterosexual white man, it is also very unlikely that you ever will be. This, clearly, is in fact why you can make jokes about it.

The thread continues. In particular one woman, Kyla Phil, continuously tries to object to Max and Montle’s trivializing of rape and violence, however she is continuously bullied, talked down to, ignored.

Each comment made me feel more sick, more angry, more out of control. I understood why my friend was scared of these men: It is not just the cultural capital that they wield against anyone who challenges them that makes them an object of fear; it is that what they are saying is genuinely terrifying and threatening:

Montle:

in all honesty, im just a ignorant selfish fuck who choses not to care unless something affects me personally… as big pun said “respect crime but not when it respects mine”… big pun used to beat his wife

I tweeted the screen shots of the conversation. People all over the country were horrified. People retweeted at FHM. Eventually editor, Brendan Cooper, was pressurized into suspending the two writers. Cooper is quoted in City Press as saying: “They’re actually nice boys. But having these comments linked to my brand (has) me absolutely furious.”

Nice boys, he says.

Max and Montle then issued an aggressive non-apology in which they accuse South Africans of embarking on a ‘witch hunt’ (way to instrumentalise the abuse and murder of tens of thousands of women to defend men making jokes about abusing women) based on ‘blind hate’ for the two writers, writing: ‘We find honesty in the unfiltered horror of life, not in politically and socially correct reportage which trivializes the real issues. It is our hope now that the newspapers and the social media mobs will react as strongly and as violently to more important matters in our country.’

Max and Montle’s continued trivializing of their comments, and of rape culture, the continued aggression and dismissal of many others, the vapid Daily Maverick post that says the real problem here is people getting angry, insensitively claiming ‘outrage porn’. The “Thought Leader” blog crying because ‘Two people were suspended. Just like that. People who, from what I can tell, were respected enough and presumably liked among their peers’ and calling me a vindictive killjoy who single handedly ruined Mandela’s birthday. The comments on the blogs about evil twitter feminists, the pointed personal comments on blogs that are clearly by people who know me. The rape threats. The hatred. The patronizing, mansplaining assumption that we are idiots who don’t understand the joke. Every single person who feels like it is more important to critique the media outcry about violent hate speech than it is to think about what this hate speech actually means, what it does, is one more person telling me that these boys’ lives are more important than mine, than ours.

Every singe tweet, every defense, every ‘angry twitter feminist’ accusation, makes me more scared when I walk home alone, less capable of being in any kind of emotional relationship with men, less sure of my capacity for serious writing, Every single attack makes me less of myself, because I know that you care more about the welfare, about the wages, the reputation of two violent men than you do about the pain of women; because my life is worth so much less to you. Every single attack, however stupid, however badly written, however much I laugh it off, is a knife on the edge of my throat again.

This piece, of course, is not ‘serious writing’. I know that by writing this I am opening up myself further to more hurt, more trauma, more abuse; of course I am lacerating myself to the point where the immediate response can only be well that’s your subjective emotional unreasonable hysterical feminine response, you can’t blame us for that. Well, firstly, I can and will. Secondly it is not just my position. The position of traumatized subject is shared in its infinite horrifying variants by countless women (and men) in South Africa and elsewhere. It might be useful to remember that it is estimated that 40% of South African women are raped in their lifetimes and that only one in nine rapes are likely to be reported. A much higher percentage have experienced some kind of sexual violence or attempted sexual violence, and I would argue that near to every single woman and girl in South Africa has experienced some kind of sexual harassment.

We have suffered, we suffer, we are suffering. And your violence, your defense of violence, your disregard for real victims, your aggression, your silencing, your abuse is making us suffer more. I did not call out these men because they made jokes about violence; I called them out because their jokes are violent, and because they cause real and serious damage to me, to survivors, to us.

I wish I could take away Max and Montle’s violence. I wish that I could stop them from hating me, from hurting me and my sisters. But, I don’t know how to do that, how to take the violence from men (this testimony is a way of trying, but it rarely works). What I did, what I will continue to do, is to stop them from writing, from having a voice, from having influence, from being that joke in a room full of drunk boys and a girl passed out on the couch, that joke that says hey lets fuck her, lets film it, lets show everyone, hey I hear she’s gay she deserves it hey lets destroy her lets cut her maybe lets kill her no but that’s too far it wouldn’t be that kind of rape right it would just be the kind where she’s my girlfriend and it was romantic and no means yes right and this is all really funny anyway and lets just slip it in her just this once it will be hilarious …

Or maybe it will be the kind of rape Max himself fantasizes about in one of his published texts for (surprise!) Vice titled ‘THE JOURNALIST’S GUIDE TO ECO-FRIENDLY PEDOPHILIA’:

Admittedly the only reason to actually come here, unless bound by journalistic duty, is to get ass. The tent next door is crammed full of virgin, eight of them, though the number fluctuates. Doing some quick math, that puts anywhere between thirty and sixty-four semen receptacles within a fifteen meter radius of our sleeping grounds. Hunting in the daisy fields is much like hunting in the savannah: locate the weak one in the herd – usually swaying a little too much to whatever crap band is playing; approach and begin lying – how much you love this band, how you know them personally, how you were actually in the band at some stage; flash your media pass and, if you work for One Small Seed, drag the meat back to your magazine’s snazzy tent, club it into submission with pumping house music and have your way. Clean up. Repeat. Glorious.

Max and Montle, I am not in any way sorry for what is happening to you. Do not be misled – I am not misdirecting my anger, I am not ‘more angry’ with you than a man who rapes a woman, I do not hate men or even either of you. But, I do hate rape and abuse and male violence and the structural sexism and misogyny that allow fear to govern our lives. I hate what you said and how you spoke and how you continue to speak. I am angry with you. I am furious. And however much you continue to hurt us, to hate us, to try and destroy us, as best as I can I am going to stand square in the middle of your fucking way…

* Image by Zanele Muholi.

The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson Goes to “Mali”

Where to begin with the foolishness that is Jon Lee Anderson’s recent article on Mali in the New Yorker? Maybe with my own disclosure. Before it was published, one of the magazine’s fact-checkers called me about the piece, essentially asking if one could leap from ibn Battuta’s vision of the Mali empire in the 14th-century to the Republic of Mali’s crisis today. Errr… She was dubious. Me too, and I think we were both a little frustrated. It can’t be easy to be a fact-checker for a Famous Author. The result is the muddled interpretation that “slavery has dominated [Mali’s] history, with the lighter-skinned Arab-descended peoples of the north often in positions of control over the darker-skinned Africans of the south.” Nifty to have a fact-checker, but you’re still responsible for your own bullshit.

I don’t know Jon Lee Anderson. He writes well. He did a book on Afghanistan that I appreciated. I couldn’t take it quite as seriously, though, after a Brooklyn-based correspondent who had spent a lot of time there told me that Anderson’s skin-tight jeans made him the butt of many a joke. Apparently during interviews, guys with Kalashnikovs would grab his ass. I don’t have a fact-checker to scope that out for me. Maybe it’s not true.

I do know a bit about Mali, but I hardly recognize Anderson’s version of it. There is a strange tail-wagging quality to his article—as in the tail wagging the dog, and the inconsequential muscling out the meaningful. The best parts of Anderson’s Afghanistan work drew straight-forwardedly on conversations with Afghans rendered in his dry, precise prose. In this piece, even people who talk sense and who know what they are talking about are drowned out by the sensational and by Anderson’s own pre-conceived but poorly supported ideas. So here are a few facts.

Mali is not another French neo-colony that “has never quite managed to maintain its existence as a sovereign state.” It’s been proudly independent for fifty years, which is partly why calling on the French to intervene was a very bitter pill to swallow (although I stand by my argument that it was strong but necessary medicine). The country is not riven by “a racial divide, which effectively split[s] the country in two.” Nor has it known “centuries of subjugation,” only—as Anderson points out—roughly eighty years of colonial rule. They did not produce a submissive population. It is true that there is a set of old colonial statues on Kuluba, the “great hill” that overlooks Bamako and on which the presidential palace sits. Anderson reads a lot into this little park, which Alpha Oumar Konaré, historian and former president (1992-2002), set up and made into a space for reflection, as the statue of a boy and girl reading (image above), smack in the center of the park, indicate. Is it a colonial theme park? Not exactly. Amongst the colonial debris towers a list of “martyred cities and towns,” all victims of the French conquest between 1878 and 1920. The list faces out towards the road, and serves as a point of entry into the portico. The statues Konaré set up in the city center—for the murdered student leader Abdoul Karim Camara known as ‘Cabral’ (d. 1980), for the assassinated president Modibo Keita (r. 1960-68, d. 1977), for Peace and for African Unity—better represent spatially his particular blend of democratic, nationalist, and pan-Africanist politics. “Do statues of King Léopold still stand in Kinshasa?,” Anderson asks rhetorically. Yes, but it’s been stashed out of sight, and that of Henry Morton Stanley would seem to be reclining. Across the river, Brazzaville recently built a creepy mausoleum for Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, humanitarian explorer or rapist, depending on whom you ask. Of course, none of that makes good copy, and it clutters Anderson’s argument.

Here’s some more clutter. France did lose a helicopter pilot early in the campaign. He was shot, but not shot down. He apparently bled to death from a wound in his thigh. That might be a distinction without a difference. Other things do matter. While it’s true that Chad “announced that two AQIM chiefs,” namely Moktar Belmoktar and Abou Zeid “had been killed,” it’s not true that they were killed. Abou Zeid died, probably in a French airstrike in support of Chadian troops on the ground. Moktar Belmoktar did not. Maybe the fact-checker called the Press Office in N’Djamena. Another phone call or two might have helped.

Here’s another fact, even more relevant: Mali does have more than a few “leaders of note,” although it is true that the political scene is quite divided. There were twenty-eight candidates for the presidential elections to be held later this month, until one of the most qualified of them—Tiébilé Dramé, who had recently been the lead negotiator in rebels in Ouagadougou—pulled out this week. Anderson talked to Dramé, who is fluent in English. I hope he was counted among the “leaders of note.” There are a host of others, from the eminent Ibrahim Boubacar Keita to the less-known Moussa Mara, not forgetting the intellectuals, the elders, and those active in, yes, civil society (Aminata Dramane Traore? Fatoumata Sira Diakité?).

But why bother to track them down, when you’ve arranged an interview with a guy who does vulgar dances in Timbuktu using—shall we say—special equipment? Hats off to Anderson, I suppose, for giving us a vision of Timbuktu that goes beyond mosques and manuscripts, but was it worth embedding with a column of French marines to get a few column inches on a guy with a godemiché (excuse my French)? The man is not a griot, but a woloso, or hosso—someone “born into the house” as a slave, someone who can use his own supposed shamelessness to extort his “honorable” noble “betters.” Anderson actually does a pretty good job of describing this phenomenon, without explaining it. The thing is, griots are not slaves. In fact, in the days of slavery, griots—like blacksmiths and other casted artisans—could not be enslaved. At least that’s what they said, and when you’re the keeper of the tradition, everything’s about you. And maybe that, in a long circuitous way, is the moral of Anderson’s story.

In the end, Anderson manages to explain nothing. It’s a puzzling piece, because Anderson is known as a matter-of-fact, phlegmatic reporter, while the New Yorker is known for its cartoons, not its caricatures. Still, it could have been worse. Heaven knows that the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff is filing from Mali now. The message, for anyone who can bear to read Kristoff, will be “Malians Are Miserable And You Can Help.” Thank God for the New York Review of Books.

Opening night film at Durban International Film Festival banned

After sitting through a series of speeches by distinguished guests at my first Durban International Film Festival I was shocked, just as most of the audience was, when Festival Director Peter Machen introduced the opening film, ‘Of Good Report’ by Jahmil XT Qubeka, to loud applause only to step off the stage and step back onto it moments later after, instead of the film, a “warning message” played onscreen.

This film has been refused classification by the Film and Publications Board, in terms of the Film and Publications Act 1996. Unfortunately we may not legally screen the film ’Of Good Report’ as to do so would constitute a criminal offence.

According to the Film and Publication Board of South Africa the film–about a high school teacher preying on one of his students– contains “scenes of child pornography” and to screen it would constitute a criminal offense.

A large part of the audience thought it was a joke, I believe, but when Peter Machen stepped back onto the stage to say that it wasn’t, there was confusion and shock. No the least from the cast members, most of whom were there. Qubeka (in the photo above) promptly put tape over his mouth and tore up his I.D. book on stage.

The festival didn’t show an alternate film out of respect for Qubeka who had earlier said he had been bringing projects to the festival for ten years and felt honoured that he had been given opening night film.

I was disappointed, to say the least, because the festival sent the film to the Film and Publication Board on 10 July and when it wasn’t cleared they tried to bring an urgent application to the board earlier that day (18 July) but this didn’t work.

With so short a time for the red tape that must involve such classifications, DIFF could have done more.

At festivals like the Berlinale pre-screenings are commonplace a day or two before the official opening for press, and if we think of films such as ‘Skoonheid’ no doubt there must have been a back-and-forth for clearing as well.

Cast and crew members of ‘Of Good Report’ feel that the Film and Publication Board is trying to keep from the public pressing issues of real-world realities (in this case: older men who date and take advantage of young girls) that perhaps resonate too close to home for some? The film’s producer Michael Auret says:

I am shocked and saddened. (…) What has become of our constitutional rights as citizens in South Africa. This is like the censorship of the old National Christian fascists of apartheid. We will fight to give South Africans the right to see the film.

Asked to comment, artist Jean Meeran says:

I want to be banned too, really. If I haven’t already, in spirit. Yes, because that’s when you know you’re doing something of value. I used to work at the Film Board, for two years. It’s very precarious, it’s three people in a room, ticking boxes, like anyone — an ex-driving instructor, a priest and myself — and it just depends who is in the room. You could end up being banned. I don’t know how it is there now. That time it was like that. If a woman is made to look like a child then it’s child pornography — it’s irrelevant that she’s actually 23. It really depends who was sitting in the room. If they’re looking through the male gaze and they can’t look outside that they would think it’s just pornography.

Needless to say, everyone will watch the film as soon as it’s cleared.

Opening night at Durban International Film Festival banned

After sitting through a series of speeches by distinguished guests at my first Durban International Film Festival I was shocked, just as most of the audience was, when Festival Director Peter Machen introduced the opening film, ‘Of Good Report’ by Jahmil XT Qubeka, to loud applause only to step off the stage and step back onto it moments later after, instead of the film, a “warning message” played onscreen.

This film has been refused classification by the Film and Publications Board, in terms of the Film and Publications Act 1996. Unfortunately we may not legally screen the film ’Of Good Report’ as to do so would constitute a criminal offence.

According to the Film and Publication Board of South Africa the film–about a high school teacher preying on one of his students– contains “scenes of child pornography” and to screen it would constitute a criminal offense.

A large part of the audience thought it was a joke, I believe, but when Peter Machen stepped back onto the stage to say that it wasn’t, there was confusion and shock. No the least from the cast members, most of whom were there. Qubeka (in the photo above) promptly put tape over his mouth and tore up his I.D. book on stage.

The festival didn’t show an alternate film out of respect for Qubeka who had earlier said he had been bringing projects to the festival for ten years and felt honoured that he had been given opening night film.

I was disappointed, to say the least, because the festival sent the film to the Film and Publication Board on 10 July and when it wasn’t cleared they tried to bring an urgent application to the board earlier that day (18 July) but this didn’t work.

With so short a time for the red tape that must involve such classifications, DIFF could have done more.

At festivals like the Berlinale pre-screenings are commonplace a day or two before the official opening for press, and if we think of films such as ‘Skoonheid’ no doubt there must have been a back-and-forth for clearing as well.

Cast and crew members of ‘Of Good Report’ feel that the Film and Publication Board is trying to keep from the public pressing issues of real-world realities (in this case: older men who date and take advantage of young girls) that perhaps resonate too close to home for some? The film’s producer Michael Auret says:

I am shocked and saddened. (…) What has become of our constitutional rights as citizens in South Africa. This is like the censorship of the old National Christian fascists of apartheid. We will fight to give South Africans the right to see the film.

Asked to comment, artist Jean Meeran says:

I want to be banned too, really. If I haven’t already, in spirit. Yes, because that’s when you know you’re doing something of value. I used to work at the Film Board, for two years. It’s very precarious, it’s three people in a room, ticking boxes, like anyone — an ex-driving instructor, a priest and myself — and it just depends who is in the room. You could end up being banned. I don’t know how it is there now. That time it was like that. If a woman is made to look like a child then it’s child pornography — it’s irrelevant that she’s actually 23. It really depends who was sitting in the room. If they’re looking through the male gaze and they can’t look outside that they would think it’s just pornography.

Needless to say, everyone will watch the film as soon as it’s cleared.

Film banned on opening night of Durban International Film Festival

After sitting through a series of speeches by distinguished guests at my first Durban International Film Festival I was shocked, just as most of the audience was, when Festival Director Peter Machen introduced the opening film, ‘Of Good Report’ by Jahmil XT Qubeka, to loud applause only to step off the stage and step back onto it moments later after a “warning message” played instead of the film.

The film, according to a 1996 law of the Film and Publication Board of South Africa, contained “scenes of child pornography”, and to screen it would constitute a criminal offence.

A large part of the audience thought it was a joke, I believe, but when Peter Machen stepped back onto the stage to say that it wasn’t, there was confusion and shock. No the least from the cast members, most of whom were there. Qubeka (in the photo above) promptly put tape over his mouth and tore up his I.D. book on stage.

The festival didn’t show an alternate film out of respect for Qubeka who had earlier said he had been bringing projects to the festival for ten years and felt honoured that he had been given opening night film.

I was disappointed, to say the least, because the festival sent the film to the Film and Publication Board on 10 July and when it wasn’t cleared they tried to bring an urgent application to the board earlier that day (18 July) but this didn’t work.

With so short a time for the red tape that must involve such classifications, DIFF could have done more.

At festivals like the Berlinale pre-screenings are commonplace a day or two before the official opening for press, and if we think of films such as ‘Skoonheid’ no doubt there must have been a back-and-forth for clearing as well.

Cast and crew members of ‘Of Good Report’ feel that the Film and Publication Board is trying to keep from the public pressing issues of real-world realities (in this case: older men who date and take advantage of young girls) that perhaps resonate too close to home for some? The film’s producer Michael Auret says:

I am shocked and saddened. (…) What has become of our constitutional rights as citizens in South Africa. This is like the censorship of the old National Christian fascists of apartheid. We will fight to give South Africans the right to see the film.

Asked to comment, artist Jean Meeran says:

I want to be banned too, really. If I haven’t already, in spirit. Yes, because that’s when you know you’re doing something of value. I used to work at the Film Board, for two years. It’s very precarious, it’s three people in a room, ticking boxes, like anyone — an ex-driving instructor, a priest and myself — and it just depends who is in the room. You could end up being banned. I don’t know how it is there now. That time it was like that. If a woman is made to look like a child then it’s child pornography — it’s irrelevant that she’s actually 23. It really depends who was sitting in the room. If they’re looking through the male gaze and they can’t look outside that they would think it’s just pornography.

Needless to say, everyone will watch the film as soon as it’s cleared.

5 New Films to Watch Out For, N°28

Here’s another pick of five interesting-looking new films that have come out recently. Born This Way is a film by Shaun Kadlec and Deb Tullmann about gay activists and members of “Alternatives Cameroun,” the first LGBT organization in Cameroon — a cause made all the more urgent by the recent killing of Camfaids director and activist Eric Lembembe. You’ll also recognize lawyer (and AIAC’s “woman of the year”) Alice Nkom:

El Gusto is Safinez Bousbia’s film about an Algerian group of Jewish and Muslim musicians who were separated by history over 50 years ago and have been reunited some years ago to share once again their passion for Chaabi music. They have since gone on to record albums with Damon Albarn and Sodi:

Aya de Yopougon, the film interpretation of Marguerite Abouet’s popular graphic novel set in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, has been a long time coming. The animated film draws from the first two volumes of the series she collaborated on with graphic artist Clément Oubrerie, also the co-director of the film:

Incarcerated Knowledge is a documentary by AIAC’er Dylan Valley who has followed a man, Peter, from the first day of his release from South Africa’s most notorious prison. Having foresworn his membership of the powerful ‘28s’ gang, Peter is intent to reintegrate himself back into his community through his passion for Hip-Hop:

And The New World is a story written and directed by Jaap van Heusden about a Dutch woman (Bianca Krijgsman) whose life is changed by an Ivorian refugee () who is held “in transit” at the detention center for asylum seekers where she works as a cleaner. Here’s a clip:

Mandela Day

Some families vacation in Disney World or Cape Cod. Not mine. Our destinations of choice when I was growing up were marches on Washington, picket lines, or protests at City Hall. As a six-year old, I got lost in a crowd of one million at a May Day rally in Central Park while my parents and siblings called for the abolishment of nuclear weapons. We marched to get the U.S. out of El Salvador, for sanctions against South Africa, against the greedy hospital bosses who forced my mom out on strike seemingly every summer, and for women’s right to choose.

The protests were our household’s religion. But you had to have a lot of faith to practice our particular version. The strikes always dragged on and, it seemed, there was always need for another abortion march. Then in 1990, when I was in eighth grade, something miraculous happened. On a Sunday morning, my mother screamed upstairs for her four children to wake up: Nelson Mandela was being released from prison after 27 years in confinement. As the world improbably celebrates Mandela’s 95th birthday today, my mind flashes back to that morning, crowded around the television in my family’s Bronx living room, witnessing history.

It had been just four years earlier that Mandela’s South Africa would forever become part of my life. On a late December day in 1986, my parents took me to Queens to protest the killing of Michael Griffith, a young black man, by a mob of white youths. A week earlier, the gang had pummeled the 23-year-old Griffith with baseball bats, hurled insults his way, and chased him onto the Belt Parkway, where a car ran him down. As we marched through the streets of Howard Beach, hundreds of white residents streamed out of their homes onto the sidewalks, screaming racist epithets at us. A few of them thrust watermelons above their heads. We marched and shouted back, “Howard Beach, have you heard? This is not Johannesburg!”

In South Africa, where leaders like Mandela were already locked up, the apartheid government had declared a State of Emergency to curb an increasingly defiant opposition. It banned certain political organizations, prohibited open-air gatherings, and sent the police and military into black townships to detain thousands of people. I’d seen the images daily on the evening news: peaceful protests broken up with tear gas, rubber bullets and baton charges. The violence seemed so far away—until the hatred in Howard Beach brought South Africa home, searing into my mind a connection that made the injustice a continent away seem more urgent.

Now, improbably, Mandela had been released. A week later, I wrote an essay for my eighth grade English class about how the apartheid government couldn’t break Mandela. “Nelson Mandela’s lesson is that when we keep our spirit, our commitment and our sense of worth alive, we can and will succeed in finding beauty and meaning in life,” I wrote.

Five months later, two important events in my life happened on the same day: I graduated from eighth grade, and Mandela visited the Bronx. It was part of his world tour to keep the pressure on the apartheid government.

At graduation, I gave a speech that exhorted my classmates to fight against injustice as Mandela had done. In my 14-year-old mind, history was a progressive, purposeful force. Mandela had been released and he would lead a South Africa defined by multi-racial cooperation and better lives for all. Later that night, I went with my family to hear him speak at Yankee Stadium. The repeated call and response of “Amandla…Ngawethu”—“the power…is ours,”—left us hoarse.

When I had the chance to study abroad during college, choosing a destination was easy. I picked South Africa and enrolled at the University of Fort Hare, the former missionary institution Mandela had once called home. I set out to follow in my childhood hero’s footsteps. I had no idea that the neat narrative of contemporary South African history I had constructed in my head with Mandela as the hero would turn out to be a lot more complicated.

I arrived at Fort Hare in January of 1997. As I entered my dorm room I saw posters hanging on the wall, but not of Mandela. Instead they were of Chris Hani, the former chief of staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress, and Oliver Tambo, who led the ANC for more than 20 years. My South African classmates came in and immediately asked if I knew of the heroic roles these men had played in keeping hope for liberation alive while Mandela was in prison.

A few weeks after my arrival, voices singing in perfect harmony awakened me, followed shortly thereafter by banging on my door. I threw on a t-shirt and shorts and joined a group of 100 students as they marched across campus, singing protest songs. We waved tree branches in the air and I quickly learned the traditional protest dance known as the toyi toyi. We were singing the same songs that had become trademarks of the fight against apartheid. But now, three years after the election of Mandela, the target of the protests was not the departed apartheid government. The students were angry because many were being expelled from campus for their inability to pay tuition and fees. That was not supposed to happen in my vision of the new South Africa, the South Africa led by Mandela.

Fort Hare was helping to deconstruct my own simplistic view of the country’s history. As I benefited from this powerful learning experience, I thought about the institution’s alumni. The university had educated not only Mandela, but just about every other leader of significance to the South African liberation movement. That remarkable record, however, remained largely hidden. During my semester on campus, I tried to find books about it, but came up empty. So I decided I’d do something about it: I would write a book about Fort Hare that would suitably record the university’s role in the historic transition everyone in South Africa—including a young hero-worshipper from the Bronx—was then experiencing.

I secured a fellowship to conduct oral histories of former students at Fort Hare. In 1999 I returned to South Africa and got to work. Of course, I started with the school’s most famous alumnus. In his autobiography, Mandela called Fort Hare “Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale all rolled into one” for black South Africans. It was at Fort Hare where some of the earliest signs of Mandela’s unwavering conviction began to emerge. He was expelled in 1940 after he refused to bow to pressure from the school’s administration to abandon a protest that began over the poor quality of food in the students’ dining hall.

I drafted a letter to Mandela, requesting an interview. But he was president of South Africa at the time and I didn’t get a response. I sent another letter, and then a third. And finally, a reply came. The president would not be able to see me. He was no longer granting interviews to researchers because of the large quantity of requests he received.

I was disappointed, believing the project would be a failure without the participation of Fort Hare’s most famous former student. I’d have to try another approach. I had set up several appointments with some of the key figures of the liberation movement. Besides learning their stories, I might be able to ask them to intercede with the president for me. I hopped into my battered white Ford Meteor and drove into the heart of the Transkei, the region of Mandela’s birth. I steered on winding roads dotted with cows and goats and past bright turquoise Xhosa homes. After 10 hours, I arrived in the town of Cala, minus a hubcap and with only half a tail pipe, the result of a 360 on a rain-soaked dirt road.

I had an appointment in Cala with Ambrose Makiwane, who studied at Fort Hare a little more than a decade after Mandela left. He was elected president of the African National Congress Youth League and developed a reputation as a fierce campus activist. His leadership was needed, as he arrived at Fort Hare just as students had begun to protest against a move by the apartheid government to seize control of the university.

Later in life, he became known for giving out lashes to soldiers in one of the ANC’s guerrilla training camps, earning the nickname Mbobo, or hosepipe, for his weapon of choice. But on the day I went to see him, there was no sign of a hosepipe. In fact, at first there was no sign of him. When you get to Cala, “just ask anyone and they’ll show you to my home,” he had told me the day before on the phone. Apparently, he wasn’t as well known as he thought. It took an hour and half and about ten tries before I found someone who could show me where he lived.

I finally found a man far removed from his days as an enforcer. Makiwane, in his seventies, spent most of his time tending cows. We talked about how his family was too poor to send him to college and how he had saved up money by working as an organizer for the laundry workers’ union. He recalled leading protests to prevent the government takeover, but said the protests ultimately failed. He admitted to using the hosepipe, and could still scowl like someone with an authoritarian streak, but said he “often advised a more limited number of lashes than other folks in the camp.” We talked about Mandela, but I left no closer to an interview with the president.

On the way home, I stopped in to see Kaiser Matanzima, who studied at Fort Hare with Mandela. Matanzima, who was a nephew of Mandela’s, graduated in 1939, but followed a very different path from that of his uncle. He became a chief and assented to the apartheid government’s system of separate development in order to cement his power. When he accepted the government’s Bantu Authorities Act, which created separate homelands for blacks, Mandela called him a “sell-out in the proper sense of the word.”

I pulled into Matanzima’s driveway. He stood in the doorway in a black Fort Hare blazer, with yellow pinstripes. We sat down to lunch and it quickly became apparent that the 83-year old had little memory left. He denied ever having any problems with Mandela or any of his other contemporaries at Fort Hare and insisted that he fought for liberation just like them. One couldn’t tell where his dementia started and selective amnesia began, but it became clear to me that Fort Hare’s story wasn’t straightforward. Not only did it produce the likes of Mandela, but it also gave rise to people like Matanzima, who served as puppets of the apartheid regime.

Back in the Ford Meteor, I drove to Port Elizabeth, on the Indian Ocean. The Eastern Cape African National Congress leader Govan Mbeki had been in jail with Mandela and might be able to approach him on my behalf. His son, Thabo, succeeded Mandela as president of South Africa. I was on the phone with Mbeki, getting driving directions, when he casually said, “then you’ll make a right turn on Govan Mbeki Avenue.” I was about to meet a man on a street bearing his own name in a country that had kept him locked up for 24 years.

Before I could get any questions out, Mbeki said, “allow me to give you a little history lesson.” I still remember how he called out the full name of James Barry Munnik Hertzog in a distinctive baritone, and explained how a series of bills the prime minister pushed disenfranchising Africans helped politicize the students at Fort Hare. “We turned around to our missionaries to find an answer,” Mbeki told me. “They were afraid to come out openly against Hertzog. They wouldn’t.”

I drove to Durban, where I met Rama Thumbadoo, one of many Indian students to attend Fort Hare because no other university welcomed them. He told me how the university opened Indians up to a wider world. They had been trained by apartheid to think of Africans as “hewers of wood and carriers of water.” But at Fort Hare, they studied and lived and played together with blacks. The Indians took that spirit of camaraderie back with them to Durban, where many of them returned to teach, showing a new generation of Indians that a different South Africa was possible.

I still hadn’t met Mandela. Mbeki tried to help, but to no avail. He gave me the cell phone number of Mandela’s private secretary, but she equivocated. Some time later I attended a funeral where Mandela spoke, but it was an impossible time to approach him. The next year, Mandela came to New York when I was working at NBC News. Tom Brokaw was going to dinner with him. I tried, but failed to finagle an invite, and instead settled for Brokaw’s promise to hand Mandela a letter from me describing my project and requesting an interview while he was in town. No luck.

By then I had met dozens of others who fought in ways big and small to topple apartheid. They all got started agitating at Fort Hare and their collective memories helped tell the history of sub-Saharan Africa’s most significant institution of higher education. I recount that history in the book Under Protest, which came out on the 16th anniversary of Mandela’s election. One voice is missing: Mandela’s.

Without fail, the first question people ask when they find out about the book is, “what was it was like to meet Mandela?” When I say that we never met, I always sense a tinge of disappointment. But I’m no longer let down. More than 25 years after I was introduced to South Africa on the streets of Howard Beach, my search for Mandela taught me much more than a meeting would have, fascinating as it might have been. I learned that the country’s past is bigger than any one icon and that its future depends on getting beyond the “miracle” of his election.

Many still find it hard to get beyond the Mandela myth. Shortly after Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu described that new South Africa as a “rainbow nation,” the phrase spread among politicians, the media and big business to paint a view of South African history far more simplistic than the reality on the ground. “It has been accepted by both the national and the foreign media as the descriptive label of the South African nation,” wrote South African political scientist Adam Habib. “And, it has beguiled the outside world into trumpeting the ‘miracle’ of the South African transition.”

Clint Eastwood bought into the miracle in his 2009 movie “Invictus,” about the role rugby played in bringing about reconciliation in South Africa. In the movie’s facile rendering of South African history, Mandela inspires a predominantly white rugby team to the world title, bringing blacks and whites together. Presumably, everyone lives happily ever after.

Not so long after the film’s debut, the New York Times ran a front page article in which it hailed white fans attending a rugby match in Soweto, the nation’s largest township, as a sign the rainbow nation had arrived. “Rugby Helps Bridge South Africa’s Racial Divide,” the front-page headline proclaimed. In reporting on the match, South Africa’s eTV conjured up my hero: “Mandela’s dream of a nonracial South Africa was starting to be realized,” a news anchor said.

But perhaps I realized something they did not: It’s a lot easier to get swept up in the feel-good story of a rainbow nation or to view Mandela as a saint than it is to actually transform a country that, 19 years after the fall of apartheid, remains one of the most unequal nations in the world. South Africa has made significant strides, but remains a place where poverty, AIDS, corruption, crime, racism and xenophobia abound. It’s a place where the president is being investigated for spending $27 million of government money renovating his private home, while students don’t have textbooks. The massacre of 34 miners at Marikana in August focused the world’s attention on the crawling pace of change in a nation where the ANC swept to power in 1994 promising “a better life for all.”

Was I wrong as a child to choose Mandela as my hero? I will never believe so, nor will I believe that my search for him was a failure, even though we never came face to face. For what the search taught me was the danger of buying into the rainbow myth or into Mandela as an icon instead of a piece of a much larger story. Such imagery, so pleasing to a child, obscures the work that still needs to be done to bring about the country Mandela himself fought so hard to achieve.

* Daniel Massey lives in New York City. Under Protest: The Rise of Student Resistance at the University of Fort Hare, was published by UNISA Press in 2010.

Julius Malema’s next move

As South Africa’s 2014 general elections approach and the ruling ANC continues to weaken under Jacob Zuma’s leadership, a host of new political parties and formations are beginning to enter the political scene — from Mamphela Ramphele’s Agang to the workerist WASP. The latest movement to emerge is the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) led by former ANC Youth League president Julius Malema and many of his former allies such as Floyd Shivambu, the actor Fana Mokoena (just below, who co-starred in the most recent Brad Pitt blockbuster) as well as even the notorious businessman and media phenomenon Kenny Kunene.

The EFF is running on the same radical redistributive program that earned Malema’s ANCYL international infamy, promising to expropriate land without compensation and to nationalize key industries. The EFF is aiming to capture the left space that the ANC has opened up with its continuing commitment to orthodox neoliberalism and series of disastrous scandals from Marikana to Nkandla. There are many youth votes up for grabs for the first time, from the generation facing 70% unemployment and with little of the lingering loyalty to the ANC, of their parents.

The other parties’ attempts to capture this key voting bloc are nothing short of laughable. The Democratic Alliance’s campaign is based upon the ridiculous Youth Wage Subsidy which nobody buys outside of the Mail & Guardian’s blog platform, Thoughtleader. The DA is now attempting to claim struggle credentials, something that would be less ridiculous if they hadn’t airbrushed every dubious figure (exhibit: Tony Leon) from their history and if their ancestors hadn’t opposed universal franchise, under the guise of anti-majoritarianism, to appeal to a reactionary white voter base.

Agang has yet to move beyond increasingly vague platitudes in terms of what they actually stand for, and anyone familiar with Ramphele’s political history — from outsourcing workers with Helen Zille at the University of Cape Town to the World Bank to Goldfields — is unconvinced she offers anything different from the DA’s contempt for the working class. She dramatically overestimates her own fame and many of the 18-25 demographic have never even heard of her and are unfamiliar with her political history with the Black Consciousness Movement.

The EFF at the same time is not a socialist party, it’s platform is still based on the Freedom Charter. It falls into the category of populism, meaning it is attempting to attract a multi-class base. The recent news of an alliance with the small radical Black Consciousness movement the September National Imbizo (SNI) is evidence of that (the SNI’s Andile Mngxitama has since joined the EFF). The SNI alliance can be seen as an attempt to reach out to alienated elements of the black middle class particularly those with cultural capital in the art world and university students.

The media has always been confused about uJuju–half Hugo Chavez, half pre-Yeezus Kanye–and treat him as both a buffoon and the biggest threat to South African democracy, but they can’t get enough of the guy. It was gross hypocrisy for them to smugly smirk about the Juju being sent off to prison, after having sold millions of papers on the back of his rhetorical genius. uJuju on the other hand, figured the media out from the beginning and used them to promote his own star. He knew that he could be a guaranteed front page story provided he said something ridiculous in every press conference and used this to get his political message into the media and almost single-handedly (Floyd helped as well) shifted the national debate to the left in South Africa. Furthermore he knew that the more racist the depictions and panic about him in the media, the more it would endear him to black working class and lumpen youth, who know perfectly well how the ‘white media’ views them — as a potential existential threat and a completely surplus population.

Juju’s rhetorical genius in and of itself deserves extended analysis, which I might commit to in the future. Malema despite his ‘G’-grade in Woodwork is no fool; in fact I suspect his matric results were a result of his position in the Congress of South African Students during his years of president. Politics, rather than school, was his priority and failing matric allowed him to solidify his power base before moving on to the ANCYL.

The EFF has a real opportunity to make inroads into the ANC’s existing supporter base as well as capturing many of the non-voter electorate. It could potentially be a game changer in South African politics, however their largest challenge will be funding their campaign, as they have severed ties with the funders of the ANC and are not exactly running on a platform attractive to capital. The principles of their leadership remain questionable and Juju, Kenny and co will have to prove they are more than mere opportunists if they are truly going to threaten the ANC’s hegemony.

A further question is whether they are an all-boys club of misogynists. So far almost all of the leadership figures are male and Floyd, Juju and Kenny are not exactly known for being of a feminist disposition. From Kenny’s harem of 15 women (apparently he is giving it up for the struggle), to Malema’s infamous comments about Zuma’s rape trial and Floyd’s infamous “sleeping around is sleeping around” interview about Helen Zille’s alleged “cabinet of concubines.” How will they endear themselves to female voters and do they even have a position on the war on women which is ongoing in South Africa and the unique economic and social challenges which affect women in this divided nation, from social grants to HIV to customary law? This remains to be seen.

Whatever happens of the EFF, I for one hope they get a few seats in Parliament, for the sake both of the appalling quality of SABC and the potential ratings, which will be seen in Parliamentary TV. There will be no more sleeping parliamentarians! And jokes aside they might just shift our national debate beyond endless repetitions of blaming corruption and incompetence for our current social malaise, with the only potential resolution this crisis being in the form of ‘improving education’, attracting more foreign investors and vague calls for leadership.

At the Protests for Trayvon Martin in New York City

The picture above shows Times Square on Sunday night, during the protest for Trayvon Martin. As I took this photo the woman with the loudspeaker was yelling out “We are here to say that black lives have value.”

That is what the demonstrations boil down to. When the Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman, something snapped within many people and there was a need to go out onto the streets and reject this outrage publicly.

The NYPD more or less behaved themselves while the baffled tourists were around, then let loose when the march reached Harlem. By 110th street two hundred demonstrators were surrounded by at least as many cops, scores of police cars, lines and lines of vans full of armoured riot police and helicopters overhead. Young black men were being picked out of the crowd and cuffed for no other reason than their being there.

Most of the crowd that protested Zimmerman’s acquittal in New York on Sunday were people of color. Perhaps white New Yorkers don’t see this as their fight, or maybe they just had prior dinner reservations.

The focus has been on whether or not black people will riot, and the police have done their best to provoke the required newsreel footage of smashed glass and punches. Like the trial, in which Trayvon was found guilty of his own murder, this is completely backwards. The focus should be on white people. Why have so many of us chosen not to demonstrate? Why have so many apparently intelligent people taken it upon themselves to explain to black people that “race” just doesn’t come into it, that they have been imagining it all along? Why is it that race never comes into it? Why, the night after the verdict, did the young white couple — in the predominantly black subway car I was riding in — choose to loudly agree with one another that the media had blown the case out of all proportion and that the real focus should be on crimes committed by black people?

What many white people have recognised is that the horror of Zimmerman’s acquittal is so obvious that it has opened the possibility for a meaningful shift. One cannot respectably deny the injustice of it, whatever the legality. People like the young couple on the subway car, or Juror B37 — who assured Anderson Cooper that Zimmerman’s “heart was in the right place” — have understood that now is the time they must gloat. People like Florida lawyer Vanessa Braeley, who debated with Gary Younge yesterday on Al Jazeera, have realised that now is the time to find people who’re angry about the murder of Trayvon Martin and to rub their noses in it, to humiliate them by insisting that their anger is foolish, immature.

Gary Younge’s was the standout piece of commentary on the day of the verdict:

Appeals for calm in the wake of such a verdict raise the question of what calm there can possibly be in a place where such a verdict is possible. Parents of black boys are not likely to feel calm. Partners of black men are not likely to feel calm. Children with black fathers are not likely to feel calm. Those who now fear violent social disorder must ask themselves whose interests are served by a violent social order in which young black men can be thus slain and discarded.

[...] Since it was Zimmerman who stalked Martin, the question remains: what ground is a young black man entitled to and on what grounds may he defend himself? What version of events is there for that night in which Martin gets away with his life? Or is it open season on black boys after dark?

From Obama we got the line “We are a nation of laws”. ”We should ask ourselves if we’re doing all we can to stem the tide of gun violence,” opined the president who has used his office to pass exactly zero gun control laws. Is a drone a gun? It was curious that just as the Nobel Laureate was urging his citizens to ask themselves whether they’d done enough to prevent violence, the Guardian published a detailed report on his kill list and how it works. The moral basis for Zimmerman’s murdering Trayvon Martin that proved so convincing to the Florida jury looks a lot like the one Obama uses for his drone strikes every single week. Just listen to Robert Gibbs justifying the killing of 16 year old Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, including that awful line “I would suggest that he should have had a far more responsible father.” As we know, everyone killed by the US was killed because they were “up to no good”.

Obama would do well to read historian Robin D.G. Kelley’s insightful reflections on the case, particularly his very astute comparison between the warped “self-defense” logic that has kept Zimmerman out of jail and that of the so-called “war on terror”. Read the whole piece, here are some excerpts:

In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, Senator Rand Paul, Florida State Representative Dennis Baxley (also sponsor of his state’s Stand Your Ground law), along with a host of other Republicans, argued that had the teachers and administrators been armed, those twenty little kids whose lives Adam Lanza stole would be alive today. Of course, they were parroting the National Rifle Association’s talking points. The NRA and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the conservative lobbying group responsible for drafting and pushing “Stand Your Ground” laws across the country, insist that an armed citizenry is the only effective defense against imminent threats, assailants, and predators.

But when George Zimmerman fatally shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed, teenage pedestrian returning home one rainy February evening from a neighborhood convenience store, the NRA went mute. Neither NRA officials nor the pro-gun wing of the Republican Party argued that had Trayvon Martin been armed, he would be alive today.

Where was the NRA on Trayvon Martin’s right to stand his ground? What happened to their principled position? Let’s be clear: the Trayvon Martin’s of the world never had that right because the “ground” was never considered theirs to stand on. Unless black people could magically produce some official documentation proving that they are not burglars, rapists, drug dealers, pimps or prostitutes, intruders, they are assumed to be “up to no good.” (In the antebellum period, such documentation was called “freedom papers.”) As Wayne LaPierre, NRA’s executive vice president, succinctly explained their position, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Trayvon Martin was a bad guy or at least looked and acted like one. In our allegedly postracial moment, where simply talking about racism openly is considered an impolitic, if not racist, thing to do, we constantly learn and re-learn racial codes. The world knows black men are criminal, that they populate our jails and prisons, that they kill each other over trinkets, that even the celebrities among us are up to no good. Zimmerman’s racial profiling was therefore justified, and the defense consistently employed racial stereotypes and played on racial knowledge to turn the victim into the predator and the predator into the victim. In short, it was Trayvon Martin, not George Zimmerman, who was put on trial. He was tried for the crimes he may have committed and the ones he would have committed had he lived past 17. He was tried for using lethal force against Zimmerman in the form of a sidewalk and his natural athleticism.

[...] If we do not come to terms with this history, we will continue to believe that the system just needs to be tweaked, or that the fault lies with a fanatical gun culture or a wacky right-wing fringe. We will miss the routine character of such murders: according data compiled by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a black person is killed by the state or by state-sanctioned violence every 28 hours. And we will miss how this history of routine violence has become a central component of the U.S. drone warfare and targeted killing. What are signature strikes if not routine, justified killings of young men who might be Al-caeda members or may one day commit acts of terrorism? It is little more than a form of high-tech racial profiling.

The picture below was taken in Union Square on Sunday evening.

At the Protests for Trayvon Martin in New York

The picture above shows Times Square on Sunday night, during the protest for Trayvon Martin. As I took this photo the woman with the loudspeaker was yelling out “We are here to say that black lives have value.”

That is what the demonstrations boil down to. When the Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman, something snapped within many people and there was a need to go out onto the streets and reject this outrage publicly.

The NYPD more or less behaved themselves while the baffled tourists were around, then let loose when the march reached Harlem. By 110th street two hundred demonstrators were surrounded by at least as many cops, scores of police cars, lines and lines of vans full of armoured riot police and helicopters overhead. Young black men were being picked out of the crowd and cuffed for no other reason than their being there.

Most of the crowd that protested Zimmerman’s acquittal in New York on Sunday were people of color. Perhaps white New Yorkers don’t see this as their fight, or maybe they just had prior dinner reservations.

The focus has been on whether or not black people will riot, and the police have done their best to provoke the required newsreel footage of smashed glass and punches. Like the trial, in which Trayvon was found guilty of his own murder, this is completely backwards. The focus should be on white people. Why have so many of us chosen not to demonstrate? Why have so many apparently intelligent people taken it upon themselves to explain to black people that “race” just doesn’t come into it, that they have been imagining it all along? Why is it that race never comes into it? Why, the night after the verdict, did the young white couple — in the predominantly black subway car I was riding in — choose to loudly agree with one another that the media had blown the case out of all proportion and that the real focus should be on crimes committed by black people?

What many white people have recognised is that the horror of Zimmerman’s acquittal is so obvious that it has opened the possibility for a meaningful shift. One cannot respectably deny the injustice of it, whatever the legality. People like the young couple on the subway car, or Juror B37 — who assured Anderson Cooper that Zimmerman’s “heart was in the right place” — have understood that now is the time they must gloat. People like Florida lawyer Vanessa Braeley, who debated with Gary Younge yesterday on Al Jazeera, have realised that now is the time to find people who’re angry about the murder of Trayvon Martin and to rub their noses in it, to humiliate them by insisting that their anger is foolish, immature.

Gary Younge’s was the standout piece of commentary on the day of the verdict:

Appeals for calm in the wake of such a verdict raise the question of what calm there can possibly be in a place where such a verdict is possible. Parents of black boys are not likely to feel calm. Partners of black men are not likely to feel calm. Children with black fathers are not likely to feel calm. Those who now fear violent social disorder must ask themselves whose interests are served by a violent social order in which young black men can be thus slain and discarded.

[...] Since it was Zimmerman who stalked Martin, the question remains: what ground is a young black man entitled to and on what grounds may he defend himself? What version of events is there for that night in which Martin gets away with his life? Or is it open season on black boys after dark?

From Obama we got the line “We are a nation of laws”. ”We should ask ourselves if we’re doing all we can to stem the tide of gun violence,” opined the president who has used his office to pass exactly zero gun control laws. Is a drone a gun? It was curious that just as the Nobel Laureate was urging his citizens to ask themselves whether they’d done enough to prevent violence, the Guardian published a detailed report on his kill list and how it works. The moral basis for Zimmerman’s murdering Trayvon Martin that proved so convincing to the Florida jury looks a lot like the one Obama uses for his drone strikes every single week. Just listen to Robert Gibbs justifying the killing of 16 year old Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, including that awful line “I would suggest that he should have had a far more responsible father.” As we know, everyone killed by the US was killed because they were “up to no good”.

Obama would do well to read historian Robin D.G. Kelley’s insightful reflections on the case, particularly his very astute comparison between the warped “self-defense” logic that has kept Zimmerman out of jail and that of the so-called “war on terror”. Read the whole piece, here are some excerpts:

In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, Senator Rand Paul, Florida State Representative Dennis Baxley (also sponsor of his state’s Stand Your Ground law), along with a host of other Republicans, argued that had the teachers and administrators been armed, those twenty little kids whose lives Adam Lanza stole would be alive today. Of course, they were parroting the National Rifle Association’s talking points. The NRA and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the conservative lobbying group responsible for drafting and pushing “Stand Your Ground” laws across the country, insist that an armed citizenry is the only effective defense against imminent threats, assailants, and predators.

But when George Zimmerman fatally shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed, teenage pedestrian returning home one rainy February evening from a neighborhood convenience store, the NRA went mute. Neither NRA officials nor the pro-gun wing of the Republican Party argued that had Trayvon Martin been armed, he would be alive today.

Where was the NRA on Trayvon Martin’s right to stand his ground? What happened to their principled position? Let’s be clear: the Trayvon Martin’s of the world never had that right because the “ground” was never considered theirs to stand on. Unless black people could magically produce some official documentation proving that they are not burglars, rapists, drug dealers, pimps or prostitutes, intruders, they are assumed to be “up to no good.” (In the antebellum period, such documentation was called “freedom papers.”) As Wayne LaPierre, NRA’s executive vice president, succinctly explained their position, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Trayvon Martin was a bad guy or at least looked and acted like one. In our allegedly postracial moment, where simply talking about racism openly is considered an impolitic, if not racist, thing to do, we constantly learn and re-learn racial codes. The world knows black men are criminal, that they populate our jails and prisons, that they kill each other over trinkets, that even the celebrities among us are up to no good. Zimmerman’s racial profiling was therefore justified, and the defense consistently employed racial stereotypes and played on racial knowledge to turn the victim into the predator and the predator into the victim. In short, it was Trayvon Martin, not George Zimmerman, who was put on trial. He was tried for the crimes he may have committed and the ones he would have committed had he lived past 17. He was tried for using lethal force against Zimmerman in the form of a sidewalk and his natural athleticism.

[...] If we do not come to terms with this history, we will continue to believe that the system just needs to be tweaked, or that the fault lies with a fanatical gun culture or a wacky right-wing fringe. We will miss the routine character of such murders: according data compiled by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a black person is killed by the state or by state-sanctioned violence every 28 hours. And we will miss how this history of routine violence has become a central component of the U.S. drone warfare and targeted killing. What are signature strikes if not routine, justified killings of young men who might be Al-caeda members or may one day commit acts of terrorism? It is little more than a form of high-tech racial profiling.

The picture below was taken in Union Square on Sunday evening.