A blogger for the liberal Nation magazine attributed Saturday’s “not guilty” verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin to “white supremacy.”
“This verdict is a crystal-clear illustration of the way white supremacy operates in America,” wrote blogger Aura Bogado Sunday, even while recognizing that Zimmerman and his family are, in part, Hispanic.
“They are not white,” Bogado wrote. “Yet Zimmerman’s apparent ideology — one that is suspicious of black men in his neighborhood, the ‘assholes who always get away’ — is one that adheres to white supremacy. … When Zimmerman was acquitted today, it wasn’t because he’s a so-called white Hispanic. He’s not. It’s because he abides by the logic of white supremacy, and was supported by a defense team — and a swath of society — that supports the lingering idea that some black men must occasionally be killed with impunity in order to keep society-at-large safe.”
Bogado took a swing at Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. president and author of the Declaration of Independence, sliming him as a “slave-owning rapist.” She also took the curious position of condemning media outlets for “fanning the flames of fear-mongering” by suggesting some may riot after the verdict, while at the same time voicing support for any such riots.
“People will take to the streets, and with good reason,” Bogado wrote. “They’ll be there because they know that, yes, some people do always get away — and it tends to be those strapped with guns and the logic of white supremacy at their side.”
Bogado has written other incendiary posts for The Nation. When Martin’s friend, 19-year-old Rachel Jeantel, took the stand, Bogado wrote that the controversy surrounding Jeantel’s sometimes hostile testimony and her inability to read a letter she claimed to have written did not impugn her credibility as a witness.
“[The criticism] displayed an obsession with determining the degree to which Jeantel can read cursive. Jeantel is indeed literate — but the question has nothing to do with her credibility as a witness in the first place,” Bogado said, adding that it revealed an “almost subconscious appetite for black destruction.”
One of Zimmerman’s friends, however, unfairly escaped criticism, Bogado said. “Mark Osterman…was never questioned about his literacy. Perhaps that’s because he penned a book with his wife, titled ‘Defending our Friend: The Most Hated Man in America,'” Bogado wrote, calling Osterman “a white man who apparently profited from the killing of a child through his book.”
Bogado’s racially-polarizing words appear in a magazine whose mission statement decries charged political writing.
“The Nation will not be the organ of any party, sect, or body,” The Nation’s mission reads. “It will, on the contrary, make an earnest effort to bring to the discussion of political and social questions a really critical spirit, and to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration, and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred.”
The Nation is the oldest continually published weekly magazine in the country.