Trapped in the 1950s

“Color will get you killed,” blurts PBS host Tavis Smiley on the ABC Sunday talk show hosted by former Clinton aide Stephanopoulos:

PBS host Tavis Smiley was among the commentators who expressed disappointment and anger at the not-guilty verdict in the Zimmerman trial. “You can stand your ground unless you’re a black man,” Smiley said Sunday

He faulted the country for a general failure to recognize the dangers African Americans face by virtue of their skin color. “Color will get you killed,” he said “and every time we have one of these cases — and I believe in looking at a case-by-case situation — but here’s the problem, every time we have this issue, somebody can always explain away why this person got off, why this person was not found guilty, and what we have is a bunch of dead black men.”

But of course — and apologies for using the crude terminology of the racialist left — Zimmerman has a color as well, as Peter Ingemi, aka, “DaTechGuy” writes:

As I watch MSNBC and see Al Sharpton et/all go crazy over the verdict of the Zimmerman case and hear the NAACP appeal to the federal government for relief I kept remembering a repeated meme that I’ve seen at Instapundit

George Zimmerman is blacker than Homer Plessy.

For those of you who are not schooled in American History Homer Plessy subject of the famous Supreme Court Case Plessy v Ferguson that established the doctrine of “Separate but equal” until Brown vs Board of Education overturned it.

As Ann Althouse and Michael Barone pointed out George Zimmerman is 1/4 Black (via his grandmother)

The Irony is overwhelming, it’s the 50′s all over again!  Consider:

A 1/4 black man has been acquitted of murder and we are seeing a  group of powerful and influential people determined to make him pay.

A 1/4 Black man has been acquitted of murder and we are seeing a mob of people willing to publicly threaten to kill him for it.

I guess they were right, Jim Crow is back after all

It’s not that it’s the ’50s all over again, it’s that the worldview of self-described “Progressives” trap them in that era. Their economic ideas are out of the FDR era, their radical environmentalism is based on America having never evolved from that smokestack era, and their view of racial relations are predicated on it always being that era as well — or perhaps even earlier.

Of course, even beyond the lack of consideration that George Zimmerman is post-racial figure, there’s an enormous cognitive dissonance in Smiley’s remark, considering the mission statement he publicly gave himself four and a half years ago:

Chris Matthews won’t be working alone. Back in November, the Hardball host said it was his job to make Barack Obama’s presidency a success. Today, another TV journalist expressed a similar sentiment. Tavis Smiley has declared that “we’re all working for Barack Obama” and that “we have to help make Obama a great president.”

The host of Tavis Smiley on PBS was a guest on Morning Joe. Reacting to Harry Reid’s claim last week that he doesn’t work for Barack Obama, Smiley said Reid should “put down the crack pipe.” Smiley added “we’re all working for Barack Obama.” It soon became clear that was no passing quip, but a literal description of how he sees his role.

And evidently, he’s still working for Barack Obama. Presumably, Zimmerman’s last name plays some role in Smiley’s opinion of him; that last name flummoxed the leftwing MSM in their initial reporting of this story, as they begin to build it into the world’s longest Two Minute Hate in an effort to boost Obama’s re-election odds last year.

Which reminds me: So America elects — twice! — its first black president, but remains trapped in the era of Jim Crow. How’s that work again?

Related: “Ann Coulter slams media ‘Mississippi Burning’ narrative after Zimmerman verdict:”

“[I] tweeted out ‘hallelujah,’ because this was a media-led mob, and an innocent man almost went to prison for 30 years because of, well, Al Sharpton stirring up hatred and creating a narrative for which there was never any evidence and after this long trial there is still never any evidence,” Coulter said. “What George Zimmerman said happened — the evidence only supported that. There is certainly no evidence that he stalked someone, that he tracked them down and picked him out either because he was black or because he was wearing a hoodie.”

She noted Zimmerman had a lawsuit against NBC for the editing of a 911 call that made Zimmerman sound as if he were targeting Martin because of race, noting that using race in that way fed into the narrative the media wanted to advance.

“[This] case never should have been brought. It was purely political for the media to continue their narrative of all of America as ‘Mississippi Burning,’” she continued. “They want to keep us divided by race, ginned up by race, and it’s a relief that someone who was innocent did not have to be the sacrificial lamb for this media narrative about America as being run by the Klan.”

To be fair, the American people did twice elect a rather Wilsonian figure to the White House.