The Black Lives Matter movement began as a hashtag in July 2013 immediately after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. Although the movement would be reinforced along the way by any number of lies — “Hands up don’t shoot” comes quickly to mind — not enough attention has been paid to the original lie, one that may eventually launch a thousand riots before it burns itself out, namely that Trayvon Martin was an innocent little boy.
On the night of February 26, 2012, George Zimmerman shot and killed the seventeen-year-old Martin. For a week the story went nowhere until the attorneys representing Martin’s family reached out to Ryan Julison, an Orlando-based media strategist and the one white member of what was rapidly becoming Team Trayvon.
Team leader, attorney Benjamin Crump, understood that the national media were suckers for a story with a racial angle, specifically one that featured a black victim of white injustice. If Zimmerman’s parents had named their son Jorge´ Zimmerman — he was named after his Uncle Jorge´– there might not have been a Black Lives Matter movement.
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After meeting with Crump, Julison immediately began pitching the Trayvon saga to the larger world. Reuters bit first. On March 7, just two days after Julison was contacted, Reuters posted an article headlined “Family of Florida boy killed by Neighborhood Watch seeks an arrest.”
The oversized opening sentence establishes a thesis that has proved irresistible to the major media for the last half century: “The family of a 17-year-old African-American boy shot to death last month in his gated Florida community by a white Neighborhood Watch captain wants to see the captain arrested.” Trayvon was a “good kid.” He hoped to be a pilot. He was carrying the soon to be iconic ice tea and Skittles, the latter for the “thirteen-year-old” son of Trayvon’s father’s girlfriend, now elevated to the role of Martin’s “brother.” Said Crump, “Trayvon only has skittles. He has the gun.”
On March 8, Current TV’s “The Young Turks” took up Trayvon’s cause. Co-host Ana Kasparian, an impressively self-righteous twenty-five at the time, made no fewer than a dozen errors in her five-minute presentation, including this whopper, “There was no self-defense in this situation.” As Kasparian envisioned the action, Zimmerman called 911 and said: “there was someone in the gated community who looks very suspicious, i.e. a young black man who makes me uncomfortable.” Apparently to ease his discomfort, “George Zimmerman decides to go ahead and shoot the 17-year-old black boy in the chest which led to his death.”
“Oh, my God,” gasped her co-host, Cenk Uygur. “He just shot him?”
“He just shot him,” affirmed Kasparian, who then pontificated, “I get so angry when people deny there is racism in this country.”
