Tag: eugene robinson
Arbery Verdict Warns Racist Killers: 'Lynching Will Be Punished'

Arbery Verdict Warns Racist Killers: 'Lynching Will Be Punished'

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet

On Wednesday, November 24 — the day before Thanksgiving 2021 — a verdict was handed down in the trial of the three Georgia men involved in the murder and lynching of Ahmaud Arbery. Travis McMichael, who shot and killed the unarmed Arbery at point-blank range, his father Greg McMichael, and their neighbor William "Roddie" Bryan were all found guilty of murder as well as aggravated assault and false imprisonment. Liberal Washington Post opinion writer Eugene Robinson applauds this verdict in a November 24 column, stressing that it sends out a vitally important message that lynching "will be punished."

The 25-year-old Arbery was out jogging in Glynn County, Georgia on February 23, 2020 when the men chased after him. Arbery was minding his own business and doing nothing wrong. The defendants claimed that they went after him because they suspected him of burglary, but there was absolutely no evidence of that — and when Travis McMichael fatally shot Arbery, the unarmed man had no way of defending himself.

Robinson, a frequent guest on MSNBC, continues, "It took just 11 hours of deliberation for the almost all-White jury to find the three White defendants guilty of lynching a Black man. Maybe there's a glimmer of hope for justice in these United States after all."

The columnist adds, however, that while he is "relieved and encouraged by the way this horrible episode has ended," it "would be wrong to forget the shockingly retrograde events that started it all."

The important message that came from a predominantly white jury, according to Robinson, is: "If white men chase an unarmed Black man down and lynch him, they will be punished."

"That should be an unremarkable statement," Robinson writes. "And we should not have to feel so relieved to see it affirmed."

#EndorseThis: Eugene Robinson On Trump’s New ‘Outreach’: ‘He Wasn’t Speaking To African Americans’

#EndorseThis: Eugene Robinson On Trump’s New ‘Outreach’: ‘He Wasn’t Speaking To African Americans’

Eugene Robinson, columnist for the Washington Post and contributor to MSNBC’s Morning Joe, pushed back on Joe Scarborough’s claim this morning that Donald Trump is better off trying to reach out to minority communities than continuing with his scorched earth campaign to win on a small, “angry” portion of the electorate.

The premise, Robinson asserted, is a false one: If Trump really wanted to reach out to black voters, why hasn’t he accepted the numerous invitations he’s received over the course of this campaign to speak to black voters directly, and to minority and civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the National Association of Black Journalists, whose convention (co-hosted with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists) Trump skipped just two weeks ago.


“Your lives are miserable! You live in hell! What do you have to lose!” Robinson said, mocking Trump’s style. “Clearly, he’s talking to white voters… in the suburbs in Philadelphia, in the suburbs of Washington D.C., and he’s trying to say ‘Look, I care about African Americans, too, in my own totally inappropriate, insulting, and condescending way. I care about them, so I’m not a racist and therefore you can vote for me.”

Trump has made a few speeches in which he addresses his awful deficit with minority voters, but his actions speak much louder than his words: He recently hired far-far-right media executive Stephen Bannon to lead his campaign, which released an advertisement last week that makes immigrants look like an invading swarm of sub-humans, and he continues to parrot an incorrect unemployment statistic about African American youth, wildly inflating the number by counting full-time students and other groups justifiably out of the labor force.

And that’s in the past month alone. Trump has a long, racist history: He was sued by Richard Nixon’s Justice Department for alleged housing discrimination (talk about a high bar to clear…), he took out a full-page newspaper ads in 1989 calling for the execution of the so-called “Central Park Five,” young teenagers who were later found to be completely innocent of the murder for which they were accused, and, just a year ago, he retweeted an phony image from a white supremacist website, spreading a lie about crime statistics. The link in Trump’s tweet has since been deleted (his tweet is still there), but here’s the image it linked to:

2015-11-23 11_56_07-Donald J. Trump on Twitter_ __@SeanSean252_ @WayneDupreeShow @Rockprincess818 @C

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, maybe a speech in a white suburb of Milwaukee isn’t going to cut it.

Photo: MSNBC

Our Selective Outrage

Our Selective Outrage

WASHINGTON — The killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown has rightly provoked widespread outrage, drawing international media attention and prompting a comment from President Obama. The same should be true — but tragically is not — of the killing of 3-year-old Knijah Amore Bibb.

Brown was killed Saturday in Ferguson, MO; Knijah died the following day in Landover, MD. Both victims were African-American. Both had their whole lives before them. The salient difference is that Brown was shot to death by a white police officer, according to witnesses, while the fugitive suspect in Bibb’s killing is a 25-year-old black man with a long criminal record.

I want to be clear: From what we know so far, the anger over Brown’s death is understandable and appears justified. Absent a full narrative from the police officer’s side, we are left with witness accounts alleging that the fatal encounter was triggered when Brown committed the unpardonable crime of “walking while black.”

We’ve been through this so many times. Brown, from all reports, was a good kid who had just graduated from high school and was about to enroll in college. But young black men are automatically assumed to be dangerous thugs — and not given the benefit of the doubt that young white men would be accorded. This is racist and wrong, and must change.

But we should be just as outraged over Knijah’s death — and just as determined that this kind of killing should never happen again.

According to police, Knijah’s family was visiting friends at a house in Landover on Sunday afternoon. Among the people who lived at the address was a young woman whose boyfriend, Davon Antwan Wallace, had also dropped by.

Wallace got into a heated argument with the girlfriend’s teenaged brother, police and family members told The Washington Post. At issue was clothing that belonged to Wallace — and that the brother had apparently been wearing. Wallace allegedly left, went to his car, got a gun and fired about six shots at the second floor of the house, apparently aiming for the brother’s room.

One of those bullets struck Knijah and killed her.

“She liked to wear silver boots in the summer,” Knijah’s grandmother, Brenda Bibb, told the Post. “She had a Hello Kitty sticker on one boot and a Dora [the Explorer] on the other.”

The entire Prince George’s County police force — not just the homicide division — has been working long hours to try to find Wallace, and is motivated by what a police spokesman called a “sense of moral outrage.”

That feeling should be universal. The near-constant background noise of black-on-black violence is too often ignored. Yet it continues to claim victims at a rate that our society should consider outrageous and unacceptable.

Landover is adjacent to Washington, D.C., where it has been a particularly bloody week: a total of 21 people struck by gunfire since last Friday. Among them were an off-duty D.C. police detective who was shot in an attempted carjacking. Most of the victims fortunately do not have life-threatening injuries, but at least one is reported in grave condition and one other has died.

I’ve written about the sad customs that have developed in neighborhoods plagued by this senseless violence — the makeshift memorials of teddy bears and balloons, the speed with which T-shirts bearing the victim’s likeness are produced. This kind of death should never be thought of as ordinary.

The phrase “black-on-black violence” is more often used to distort rather than clarify. Crime depends largely on proximity and thus reflects patterns of racial segregation; the overwhelming majority of white murder victims are killed by whites, just as the overwhelming majority of black victims are killed by blacks. By the standards of most other developed countries, “white-on-white violence” in the United States is also of crisis proportions.

But it is disingenuous to pretend that a shocking disparity does not exist. According to FBI statistics, in 2012, the last year for which figures are available, 2,614 whites were killed by white offenders and 2,412 blacks were killed by black offenders — similar numbers. But the non-Hispanic white population is almost five times as large as the African-American population, meaning the homicide rate in black communities is staggeringly higher.

Treating every young black man as a criminal — as may have happened to Michael Brown — is not the solution. We can understand the socioeconomic causes of violent crime without surrendering to them. We need to get angry — before we have to mourn the next Knijah Bibb.

Eugene Robinson’s email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.

AFP Photo/Scott Olson

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Paying For The 2003 Invasion

Paying For The 2003 Invasion

WASHINGTON — As President Obama struggles to deal with the crisis in Iraq, it’s useful to remember who gave the world this cauldron of woe in the first place: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Their decision to launch a foolish and unwarranted invasion in 2003, toppling Saddam Hussein and destroying any vestige of the Iraqi state, is directly responsible for the chaos we see today, including the rapid advance of the well-armed jihadist militia that calls itself the Islamic State.

Bush has maintained a circumspect silence about the legacy his administration’s adventurism bequeathed us. Cheney, however, has been predictably loud and wrong on the subject of, well, just about everything.

“Obama’s failure to provide for a stay-behind force is what created the havoc we see in Iraq today,” Cheney told CNN last month. “When we left, Iraq was a relatively stable place. We defeated al Qaeda, we had a coalition government in place.”

Cheney predicted “the history books will show” that Obama bears much responsibility for squandering the peace and stability that the Bush administration left behind. If so, they will have to be books that don’t go back very far.

Let’s review what actually happened. The U.S. invasion toppled a Sunni dictatorship that had ruled brutally over Iraq’s other major groups — the Shiite majority and the ethnic Kurds — for decades. It seems not to have occurred to anyone planning the invasion that long-suppressed resentments and ambitions would inevitably surface.

The leader of that “coalition government” Cheney mentioned, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, turned out not to be a Jeffersonian democrat. Rather, his regime acted quickly and shamelessly to advance a Shiite sectarian agenda — and to marginalize Sunnis and Kurds.

What followed, predictably, was anger and alienation among the disaffected groups. The Kurds focused largely on fortifying their semi-autonomy in the northeast part of the country. Sunni tribal leaders twice cast their lot with violent Sunni jihadist forces that stood in opposition to the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad — first with al Qaeda in Iraq and now with the Islamic State.

Obama opposed the U.S. invasion and occupation from the beginning. He was nominated and elected president largely because of his pledge to end the war. He withdrew all U.S. troops only after Maliki refused to negotiate a viable agreement to leave a residual force in place.

Could Obama have found a way to keep more of our soldiers in Iraq if he really wanted to? Perhaps. But this would have required trusting Maliki, who has proved himself a far more reliable ally to the terrorist-sponsoring government of Iran than to the United States. And anyway, why would U.S. forces be needed to keep the peace in the “relatively stable” democratic Iraq of Cheney’s hazy recollection?

As I write, Maliki has barricaded himself inside Baghdad’s Green Zone and is refusing to leave office, despite the fact that Iraq’s president has named a new prime minister. The United States has joined with respected Iraqi leaders to try to force Maliki out, but he holds enormous power — he is not only prime minister but also heads the Iraqi armed forces and national police.

Rewind the clock. If there had been no U.S. invasion, Iraqis surely would have suffered grievously under Saddam’s sadistic rule. But at least 110,000 Iraqis — and perhaps several times that many — died violently in the war and its aftermath. Is it likely that even the bloodthirsty Saddam would have matched that toll? Is it conceivable that the Islamic State’s ad hoc army would have even been able to cross the Syria-Iraq border, much less seize huge tracts of territory and threaten religious minorities with genocide?

Even after the invasion, if the U.S. occupation force had worked to reform the Iraqi military rather than disband it, there would have been a professional army in place to repel the Islamic State. If Maliki had truly acted as the leader of the “coalition government” that Cheney describes, and not as a glorified sectarian warlord, Sunnis likely would have fought the Islamic State extremists rather than welcome them.

Why is Obama intervening with airstrikes in Iraq and not in Syria, where the carnage is much worse? My answer would be that the United States has a special responsibility to protect innocent civilians in Iraq — because, ultimately, it was our nation’s irresponsibility that put their lives at risk.

Obama’s cautious approach — ask questions first, shoot later — may or may not work. But thanks to Bush and Cheney, we know that doing things the other way around leads to disaster.

Eugene Robinson’s email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

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