by Christopher Paslay
Journalism teachers can use the lynching of George Zimmerman as a teaching tool on media bias.
The video below by Bill Whittle exemplifies the media bias against George Zimmerman, and can be used by journalism teachers as a teaching tool:
by Christopher Paslay
After opening a discussion about communication and holding teens accountable for their behavior, Trayvon Martin supporters flood my blog with threats and verbal attacks.
I woke up this morning to the following comment by a person named “Kenny” in response to my 7/17/13 blog post titled, “Trayvon Martin and Violence in Urban Schools”:
You are a freaking racist pig. The photo you posted of Trayvon martin is repulsive. It is also a fake, you right wing freak! I’m sending this to his atty. What kind of “teacher” attacks the memory of a dead child?
You are a total, utter creep and I will contact the Inquirer to let them know you are a fraud.
Good luck with the book, dickhead.
Sounds like “Kenny” is a real peaceful guy, interested in communication and solving problems in public education and minority communities.
After this warm and heartfelt comment I was greeted by the following post on the Philadelphia Inquirer’s comment board by a person hiding behind the pseudonym “Wellwhatdouknow” responding to a commentary I published on 7/18/13, headlined, “Teach teens to communicate”:
I hope people visit the website of this “teacher” and see the racism that is all over it. He has posted a fake picture of Trayvon Martin (which was outed as fake last year) and his blog is basically a place to rant about how ugly and evil this dead kid was. It is preposterous that Philly.com would give this man a platform. I shudder to think this man is a teacher in philly. I’m going to look into which school, because his administrators might want to know what he is doing online and that he just MIGHT be a racist creep!
The threats and attacks didn’t stop there. A person named “Manse” called for my termination from the Philadelphia School District, claiming that I run a website “that is inciting racial division and publicly attacking a dead child.” He states:
I find it amazing that one of your teachers is openly attacking the memory of Trayvon Martin and has published previously discredited and very inflammatory pictures of him that first appeared (in 2012) on right-wing websites. In addition, people are finding this through an essay he penned for the Inquirer today that links to his website and the thinly veiled attacks on a dead, black teenager. Christopher Paslay apparently has taken it upon himself to publicly and brazenly attack Trayvon Martin and his family. I cannot imagine that you would want to be associated with such an awful, racially charged publication.
Now, let’s calmly and peacefully analyze these aforementioned comments, one at a time.
First, the idea that the pictures I initially posted on my blog post titled “Trayvon Martin and Violence in Urban Schools” (two of which I removed because I wanted to double check my sources) are “fake” and have been “discredited.” In fact, each one of them has been released by George Zimmerman’s defense team and subsequently published by CNN, and WESH 2 News in Orlando, among many others news and internet outlets.
I will repost them here in this context for the purposes of this article, now that I’ve once again verified their authenticity:
Next, the idea that I’m a “racist creep.” I invite “Kenny” and “Wellwhatdouknow” and “Manse” (people who, unlike me, do not write under their real full names but hide behind usernames) to take a good long look at the 296 articles I’ve published on this blog since 2008, and to take a trip to the library and look-up the 40 or so educational commentaries I’ve published in the Inquirer, Daily News, and City Paper, among others. See what I stand for, what I fight for: I’m a teacher, tutor, mentor, and coach—all in an effort to better the lives of students in the City of Philadelphia.
Next, the idea that I’m “openly attacking the memory of Trayvon Martin” and “inciting racial division and publicly attacking a dead child.”
Nothing I wrote in my 7/17/13 blog about Trayvon Martin was false or inaccurate. It’s been documented in the New York Times and other publications that Trayvon was suspended from school not once but three times; was caught with a marijuana pipe and a baggie with drug residue; was kicked out of school for graffiti after he was caught with a “burglary tool” and a bag full of women’s jewelry; had texts on his Twitter account describing an attack on a bus driver; had a video on his cellphone of two homeless men fighting over a bicycle; had pictures of underage nude females on his cellphone, as well as pictures of marijuana plants and a hand holding a semi-automatic pistol; was staying at his father’s girlfriend’s house because he’d been kicked out of his mother’s house for getting into trouble; and, according to the verdict of the jury, chose to attack and beat a Hispanic man mixed-martial-arts-style instead of simply walking away and going into his house which was not even 70 yards away.
If anyone is making “false claims” and inciting racial division, it is the American media who, ironically, doctored fake evidence against George Zimmerman, including the fact that the 28-year-old Hispanic neighborhood watch captain was first described as “white” and then, bizarrely, a “white-Hispanic.”
Consider the following:
Amazingly, it seems to be okay to completely fabricate evidence to make George Zimmerman appear racist, but when people seeking to make a comment on the life and background of Trayvon Martin, publishing accurate, documented information on the teen in an effort to bring awareness to urban life (in an attempt to admit and recognize problems so we can eventually solve them), this is vilified as “racist.”
To Kenny, Manse, and Wellwhatdouknow: you are the bullies and cowards. It is because of your refusal to acknowledge the facts that kids like Trayvon Martin are not adequately reached and properly educated in public schools in the first place.
There is a valuable lesson to be learned from the death of Trayvon Martin. It is not about profiling or racial bias, which the Martin family attorney has stated had nothing to do with the case. The lesson to be learned from the needless death of the unarmed 17-year-old African American male is one of communication, a lesson I hope to instill into the minds of my 10th-grade students this coming school year.
If George Zimmerman or Martin made more of an effort to communicate with one another on that rainy winter night, there’s a good chance Martin would be alive today. From the evidence presented during the three-week trial, we can conclude the following: Zimmerman spotted Martin walking around in a hoodie in the rain. Because there had been numerous burglaries in the neighborhood by people fitting the description of Martin, Zimmerman got out of his truck to observe the teen and locate a street address. . . .
This is an excerpt from my commentary in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer, “Teach teens to communicate.” Please click here to read the entire article. You can respond or provide feedback by clicking on the comment button below.
Thanks for reading.
–Christopher Paslay
by Christopher Paslay
Ignoring the dysfunctional behavior of troubled youth perpetuates chaos in American public schools and robs children of their right to learn.
As “Justice for Trayvon” rallies pop-up in cities across America over the acquittal of neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman, a relevant fact central to the outcome of the trial has been universally ignored: that Trayvon Martin assaulted Zimmerman, striking, straddling, and then beating the Hispanic man to the point where Zimmerman feared for his life. One juror has stated publicly that she had “no doubt that George feared for his life,” and that “his heart was in the right place.”
These statements—and the jury’s verdict (a verdict that former President Jimmy Carter agrees with)—were made after six women jurors considered all the evidence in the three-week long trial, including testimonies from over 50 witnesses, analysis of the bullet wound in Martin’s chest that showed that he was on top of Zimmerman, pictures of Zimmerman’s broken nose and lacerations to his scalp, 911 calls from panicked neighbors, and Zimmerman’s own video account of the incident, among many other things. Yet somehow these facts and all the trial evidence gets pushed aside by the “Justice for Trayvon” folk. The propagandistic narrative of an innocent young African American boy coming home from a 7-Eleven with Skittles and an iced tea who was stalked and murdered in cold blood through no fault of his own continues to be put forward.
The gaping difference between the trial evidence and the narrative of Martin supporters—which now officially includes U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice—is quite alarming. When young people commit criminal acts—such as assault, robbery, drug possession, and weapons infractions—it is difficult for some people to hold them accountable. This is especially the case when these teens are African Americans, because doing so is politically incorrect and somehow unjustly blaming “the victims” for their problems.
Take the Philadelphia student activist group Youth United for Change, for example. In January of 2011, YUC published the report “Zero Tolerance in Philadelphia: Denying Educational Opportunities and Creating a Pathway to Prison,” which argued that the Philadelphia School District’s harsh discipline policies were turning innocent youth into criminals, especially minorities. In a nutshell, the study absolved chronic rule-breakers of basic responsibility for their own behavior and portrayed violent and unruly students as powerless victims caught in an oppressive disciplinary system; one of the more controversial claims was that the presence of police officers and metal detectors in schools was causing minority students to act out.
The euphemism “kids will be kids” was used in defense of the report’s findings by a number of members of the Philadelphia public school community.
But the violence facing Philadelphia public schools at the time was a little bit more than simply “kids being kids.” Consider these facts: From 2005-06 through 2009-10, the district reported 30,333 serious incidents. There were 19,752 assaults, 4,327 weapons infractions, 2,037 drug and alcohol related violations, and 1,186 robberies. Students were beaten by their peers in libraries and had their hair pulled out by gangs in the hall. Teachers were assaulted over 4,000 times.
In the 2007-08 school year alone, there were nearly 15,000 criminal incidents reported in Philadelphia public schools. According to data published in the Inquirer, 1,728 students assaulted teachers, 479 weapons were discovered inside elementary and middle school hallways and classrooms, and 357 weapons were found in high schools.
In 2012, the Philadelphia Inquirer won a Pulitzer Prize for bringing this information to light in a series called “Assault on Learning.” Amazingly, several months after the series won the Pulitzer, Philadelphia School District officials, bowing to pressure from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, actually decided to ease the Philadelphia School District’s student code of conduct. The reason? The DOE published a report claiming that minority students were being disproportionally suspended and expelled from school because of racism of both the conscious and unconscious variety (although the report didn’t include a single documented case of discrimination against a student by a teacher).
Fast forward to Trayvon Martin. Just as groups like YUC try to portray violent and unruly youth as victims of an unjust system, so do the “Justice for Trayvon” folk portray Martin as an innocent young boy who was murdered through no fault of his own. Many people believe that the tragedy—or the crime—was that Zimmerman profiled Martin as a criminal, which is what Martin supporters insist eventually led to the boy’s death. But legally speaking, this was not the case, which is why Zimmerman was acquitted. According to the law, it is not illegal to watch someone from your car, or to get out and follow them; if it were, news reporters, paparazzi, private investigators, and single men interested in courting attractive women would all be behind bars.
According to the law (and the jury’s verdict), Zimmerman following Martin was not reckless or irresponsible enough to set in motion the events that eventually led to Martin’s death, which is why Zimmerman was found not guilty of manslaughter. The act that led to Martin’s eventual death was when Martin decided to strike and attack Zimmerman, pound his head on the cement, and to put the Hispanic neighborhood watch captain in a position where he feared for his life. Remember, when Zimmerman approached Martin, Martin could have done any one of the following: walked or ran away; went into his house; or kept a safe distance and tried to communicate. According to the evidence and the verdict of the jury, he did none of them. He chose to attack Zimmerman, an act that directly led to his own death.
But it is easier for Martin supporters to absolve Martin of all responsibility for his death. Like YUC’s report “Zero Tolerance,” which absolves violent Philadelphia school students of responsibility for their behavior in classrooms, Martin was simply a “kid being a kid.” A kid, mind you, who allegedly called Zimmerman a racist name (creepy-ass-cracker); a kid who was suspended from school not once but three times; a kid who was caught with a marijuana pipe and a baggie with drug residue; a kid who was kicked out of school for graffiti after he was caught with a “burglary tool” and a bag full of women’s jewelry; a kid who had texts on his Twitter account describing an attack on a bus driver; a kid who had a video on his cellphone of two homeless men fighting over a bicycle; a kid who had pictures of underage nude females on his cellphone, as well as pictures of marijuana plants and a hand holding a semi-automatic pistol; a kid who was staying at his father’s girlfriend’s house because he’d been kicked out of his mother’s house for getting into trouble; and a kid who, according to the verdict of the jury, chose to attack and beat a Hispanic man mixed-martial-arts-style instead of simply walking away and going into his house which was not even 70 yards away.
This is the kid whom President Obama has made his surrogate son, and the kid whose memory Obama has stated we need to “honor.”
Is Trayvon Martin’s death a tragedy? Absolutely. Did George Zimmerman make mistakes and bad decisions? No doubt. But so did Trayvon Martin.
Which leads back to the question of violence in society and our education system: Why are America’s public schools so dysfunctional and violent? Why, according to the FBI, are 91 percent of black victim homicides committed by black offenders, and 14 percent of white victim homicides committed by black offenders (twice as many as the other way around)?
Maybe because society continues to absolve people like Trayvon Martin of all responsibility for their actions, and categorizes dysfunctional youth behavior as simply “kids being kids.”
by Christopher Paslay
Teachers can use the George Zimmerman trial as a way to discuss the differences between factual evidence and emotional appeals.
“Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”
This line by Mark Twain summarizes the State of Florida’s closing arguments in the George Zimmerman trial, which I’ve watched religiously for the past three weeks.
On Friday, John Guy did tell an inspiring story to the jury during his closing statement:
The human heart, it has a great many functions . . . it moves us, it motivates us, it inspires us, it leads us, and it guides us, our hearts. . . . So if we really want to know what happened out there behind those homes on that dark, rainy night, should we not look into the heart of the grown man and the heart of that child? What will that tell us about what really happened out there?
An impassioned story indeed. Inspiring and in no way bound by facts or evidence. Twain would be pleased. The tragedy, of course, is that John Guy is not a fiction writer but a prosecutor, and he doesn’t work for a New York publishing house but the State of Florida. It is Guy’s job to follow the law and present the facts of the case—all the applicable evidence—while trying George Zimmerman, a Hispanic, for the murder of Trayvon Martin, an African American. Amazingly, Guy’s entire closing argument was virtually one long appeal to emotion. The fact that he asked jurors to “look into the heart” of George Zimmerman as opposed to the evidence, and to “use common sense” as a guide as opposed to established facts, was mindboggling.
Guy is an agent of the State of Florida and has the responsibility to uphold the Constitution. Yet Guy’s closing argument (which ironically referenced Hollywood make-believe) basically asked jurors to forget all the things they’d seen over the last three weeks, all the testimonies from witnesses that supported Zimmerman’s self defense claim, the bloody pictures of Zimmerman’s head and broken nose, the angle of the bullet wound in Martin’s chest which indicated he was on top of Zimmerman, and to use their imaginations. “What if it was Trayvon Martin who shot and killed George Zimmerman?” he asked. “What would your verdict be?”
The notion that the state can build a case on questionable evidence (and name-calling: liar, liar, liar) and ask a jury of six woman to use emotion and speculation to arrive at a verdict is outrageous. Guy very well knows that jurors cannot use emotion, sympathy, or race when arriving at a verdict, that they can only consider the evidence presented before them, which means absolutely no speculation. Today, however, we live in a bizarro world where emotion trumps the law, where social justice and a person’s unique definition of “goodness” can override the Constitution.
As Jonah Goldberg writes in The Tyranny of clichés:
A cry for social justice is usually little more than an assertion “for goodness.” “Progressive” has become a euphemism for “all good things.” But sometimes the p-word is too vague. So if you press a self-declared progressive — “What does that mean?” — they’ll respond, eventually, with something like, “It means fighting for social justice.” If you ask, “What does social justice mean?” you are likely to get an exasperated eye roll, because you just don’t get it.
Progressives are indeed changing America from a land of structured laws into a world governed by an abstract, warm and fuzzy “goodness”. A brand of goodness, interestingly, that applies only to certain groups and changes as the wind blows. This “goodness” doesn’t have to be universal or consistent because to try to define this goodness or track it’s application is to limit it, to suffocate it. Like when trying to define “art,” rules, structure, and man-made definitions are insufficient and don’t apply.
This new warm and fuzzy land of social justice with its formless existence of goodness is, for progressives, the highest, most enlightened state of being on earth. It’s what all humanity should strive for. It’s so sacred and cherished that it can be sought after by any means necessary — its ends always justify its means. You are allowed to discriminate against people to achieve it (affirmative action), and you can lie (Benghazi), cheat (IRS), murder (drones attacks on Americans), steal (Solyndra), and spy on them (NSA). Destroying an innocent person’s life in the process of seeking this higher goodness (George Zimmerman) is mere collateral damage.
You can change the rules or make them up as you go along, or disregard the law altogether, like the State of Florida asked jurors to do with their case against Zimmerman. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, really. Our president, the man who said that if he had a son he’d look like Taryvon Martin, the man who had the Department of Justice use taxpayer dollars to organize anti-Zimmerman rallies, does it all the time. Want to give amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants? Forget Congress and the law. Bam, just do it. Spy on American citizens and perhaps use this data for political reasons? Done. Use the IRS to go after political enemies? Why not. Have the DOJ tap reporters’ phones and then have the U.S. Attorney General lie about it later under oath? Got it covered. Ram universal health care down the country’s throat and then circumvent congress by picking-and-choosing which parts to enforce for political reasons? Been there, done that.
What is the law? The Constitution? We live in 21st century, post-modern America. Truth is relative. No, strike that. Truth is simply a social construct and doesn’t exist. Just like the state’s case against George Zimmerman doesn’t exist. But why should this stop progressives from wanting to send Zimmerman to prison for the rest of his life? Forget the law, and rules, and the Constitution.
What matters is social justice. That abstract, indefinable, fuzzy goodness we can all experience if we just use our imaginations.
by Christopher Paslay
Speaking out against profiling should include the hypocrisy of affirmative action against American students.
In March of 2012, the Trayvon Martin Foundation was established in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman. A Florida-based non-profit organization, one of the Foundation’s major goals is “increasing public awareness against all forms of profiling.”
According to its website:
The Trayvon Martin Foundation will use resources and tools to bring social awareness to similar cases. In this decade, we are still fighting some of the same issues that prompted the Civil Rights Movement as it pertains to injustice and racism.
Although Daryl Parks, the Martin family attorney, stated that George Zimmerman’s murder trail was not about racial profiling (despite that fact prosecutors insinuated otherwise), the non-profit foundation named after Trayvon clearly is.
When it comes to using race as a means to profile, America remains divided. Conservatives tend to fight for universal colorblindness, striving to, according to Dr. King, “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” It is liberals, ironically, who are obsessed with viewing everything in society, from college admissions to academic test scores to the demographics of police and fire departments, through the lens of race, gender, and sexual orientation.
In December of 2011, I received my M.Ed. in Multicultural Education from Eastern University. In a course titled Urban Education, we had a discussion about the concept of “colorblindness” in American society, and its ramifications. I took the position that colorblindness was an admirable goal, and that as a society, our ultimate ambition should be to simply view people as people, not whether they are black, white, gay, straight, etc. This, I stated, would be the highest form of tolerance and multiculturalism—looking past superficial cultural differences to the universal characteristics that join us all as human beings.
The professor used my viewpoint as a springboard into a lesson on social justice. “Colorblindness,” she told the class, “is a code word for white supremacy.” She went on to explain that striving for a colorblind society was dangerous, because when people no longer took race, gender, and sexual orientation into account, society would revert back to a culture dominated by the White Western Establishment. It was our duty as good citizens, she surmised, to be cognizant of other’s differences, so we could not only celebrate them, but make sure they were equally represented. In other words, colorblindness ran counter to social justice.
It is liberals, not conservatives, who are obsessed with profiling. Affirmative action, a policy that dictates we must look at a person’s race, gender, and sexual orientation when making decisions about employment, education, and the dolling out of government contracts to businesses, is a prime example. Amazingly, as the liberal establishment deceptively spins the Trayvon Martin tragedy into a lesson against racial profiling, they have no problem with the fact that the University of Texas at Austin profiled Abigail Fisher, a white woman who insists she was denied admittance into the school because of her race. Liberals also appear unmoved by affirmative action policies that keep many deserving Asian American students out of the nation’s top universities simply because too many of them are highly qualified.
According to an article in the New York Times headlined “Asian Americans in the Argument”:
“If you look at the Ivy League, you will find that Asian-Americans never get to 20 percent of the class,” said Daniel Golden, author of “The Price of Admission” and editor at large for Bloomberg News. “The schools semiconsciously say to themselves, ‘We can’t have all Asians.’ ” Mr. Golden says it is helpful to think of Asians as the new Jews because some rules of college admissions, like geographic diversity, were originally aimed at preventing the number of Jews from growing too high.
Just like Obama’s enforcement of his own health care law, liberals’ outrage over profiling is situational.
For example, it appears okay to profile a person when it comes to public education. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights conducted a report that surveyed 72,000 schools serving 85% of the nation’s students. The report used race and gender to profile the differences between students on a wide range of issues including discipline, work readiness, school finance, and dropout rates. In addition, No Child Left Behind uses race, native language, and socioeconomic status to profile the results of student achievement on standardized tests and to rate the overall quality of teachers and schools.
It also appears okay to profile when it comes to awarding government contracts to small businesses (especially minority owned), and when it comes to hiring and firing police, teachers, fire fighters, and any kind of state or government worker. It appears okay to profile when it comes to processing a non-profit organization’s request for tax exempt status; or when hiring coaches in the NFL; or when awarding Oscars for Best Actor; or when requesting that the U.S. Department of Justice get involved in charging a person with second degree murder in a shooting that was deemed by local authorities to be self defense.
It’s not okay, however, to profile a person to protect your own neighborhood and family. If there have been documented burglaries in your neighborhood by people of specific races, wearing specific clothing, and a person of that very race, clad in that very clothing, is wandering around suspiciously in the rain after dark, a community appointed neighborhood watch captain cannot stop and observe this person. That is profiling of the unacceptable kind (as is instructing that person wandering around in the rain not to dress in specific clothing that may very well provoke misunderstandings with authority). Better for that neighborhood watch person to go about his business and look the other way. Better to let 100 suspicious-acting folks wandering in the rain after dark break into your house (and continue to dress in a style of clothing with suspicious connotations) than accost one innocent person.
I have no qualms with the Trayvon Martin Foundation “increasing public awareness against all forms of profiling.” So long as “all” really means all, including profiling of the progressive liberal variety.
Chalk and Talk 