MARTIN LEE ANDERSON AND RACISM

We were gratified to see conversation and comment on our post on the murder of 14 year old Martin Lee Anderson. The issue quickly devolved into a discussion of racism.

As this post shows:

Come off it with the racism crap.I'm lily white and I'm sickened.I'm not denying that racism is pervasive and institutional. But here, in this situation, arguing that Martin Anderson is dead because of racism amounts to paranoid incitement. Representatives Barreiro and Gelber, among the first to see the tape, described the beating as "brutal," "disturbing" and "heinous." Neither are black.


We think this post by Captain hits the nail right on the head:


Rump has stirred the emotions of several bloggers with his first shot about the Martin Lee Anderson death.Here is the "racism" that some of you seem to be missing:On May 30, 2005, a beautiful blonde haired blue eyed teenager disappeared from a foreign country. Only a few days later, the entire country - and the world - new about the disappearance. And for the next several months, every single evening on TV, we watched. We watched Larry King on CNN, and that fat mouthed ugly bitch former prosecutor (sorry but I just can't stand Nancy Grace) on CNN/Headline News, and Joe Scarborough on MSNBC's Scarborough Country and, worst of all, Greta Van Susteren - on Fox's On The Record, cover this story every single day - month after month after month. The only thing that finally stopped the coverage was Hurricane Katrina.Now, we have a young black teenager, beaten to death in our own country, on video, by the police; the medical examiner from another county does the autopsy, and he makes ridiculous findings, and I have to ask the following question:Where is Larry, where is Nancy, Where is Joe, and where is Greta - why - because, guess what fellow bloggers, Martin Lee Anderson did not die in the last few days. For those of you who did not realize it, Martin Lee Anderson died on January 6, 2006 - THAT IS 43 DAYS AGO - and we are now finally hearing about the story.I look forward to the news shows this week to see if any of them even give minimal coverage to the story - or whether Greta will be back this week interviewing the mother or father Holloway on the new lawsuit that they filed last week against the wienersnautchen family. I guess it will take another Katrina to get that story off the air again.There's your racism people ....and the Captain has spoken.....

Rumpole says, well written Captain. Racism was not behind the brutal murder of Martin Lee Anderson. As another post notes, the video shows black and white guards beating Anderson. But racism may well be behind the investigation and prosecution. Martin Lee Anderson was not blond, blue eyed, and sexy like Natalee Holloway, and yet by virtue of the media coverage, you would think she was the only person murdered last year.


Anonymous makes an excellent point on institutional racism:

Black officers are often times the ones most effected by institutionalracism. You don't have to be whiteto be racist. Blacks are often times just as racist towards otherblacks as whites.So to say that because both white and black officers beat Martin, does not mean that they were noteffected by racism.The racism crap you refer to is real. Either way, if you actually read my comments, I never saidMartin was dead because of racism.I said that the pathetic response by Bush and the Government is another example of institutionalized racism at work.Don't be so simple minded.

Anonymous clears up a point in our post:

In saying this kid was in for "grand theft auto", the reader might mistakenly come to the conclusion that the perpetrator was a young thug. Here, the kid was joyriding in his Grandmother's car.

This post gets honorable mention as it made us laugh:

The reason no one commented on the Rosa Parks post is because most of the people reading this blog checked CJIS for her name and found nothing, and then figured she got tranferred to civil in the last judicial rotation.


Rumpole praises “Oh” Susannah the Herald’s courthouse scribe for a nice article on the capital murder case before Judge Blake. But Rumpole notes, almost anyone can memorize a jury chart, and we think the time and energy spent in doing that takes a lawyer away from more important tasks during voire dire. But give ASA Gayle Levine her due, she knows what she’s doing.

More importantly, we wonder did Herald Scribe “Oh” Susannah miss, leave out, or did she just not know about the taped phone calls of the defendant in the DCJ in which he calls his previous attorneys the N word and makes disparaging remarks about Jewish lawyers? Oh well, maybe she should consult us more often about her stories to see if we have any hot tips.


See You In Court. Happy President’s Day.