Very much not impossible at all. PART THREE

Now that we've demonstrated that it's very easy for an Indonesian to persecute and badly treat another Indonesian for just about any reason, racial, ethnic or otherwise; even for no reason at all.  That an Estonian might just want to rob another Estonian just because they don't like the looks of their face.     That hey, "those people" from the other side of town (or the street) are only good for cleaning our shoes, those of us from the correct side.   That well, you're from the Meru, and obviously us Kisii are better than you are.  (Insert your own comparisons; they all work the same, and are equally as worthless in merit.)

What's not impossible?    Why, just ask the media, they'll give you plenty of answers, yes and no.  Some of them even won't be made up. 




Imagine for a second that we have an ethnicity rather than a race or nationality or tribe or commune or city or church group or fraternal order.    A random person who is Hispanic /  Latino.  That person could be of any race.     Or to be more specific, let's say a person whose father is a white (United States) American, a Baptist of German descent.   A person whose mother is a Peruvian Catholic.   Whatever race she might be exactly, the people of Peru including Africans, Amerindians, Asians and Europeans.   But she speaks Spanish, and is from Peru.   So a  Peruvian or a Latina, depending on who you might ask.   The couple marries in the US and becomes a  family, a Catholic family, and eventually having four children.   These children are thus mixed-race  and / or  mixed-nationality children.   

Peruvian-American.   Hispanic.  Hispanic-American.  That's all true, unless one believes that nonsense where "any Caucasian" means one is Caucasian, period, end of story.   Or more validly (but still questionable in actual usage) that "Americans" come from anywhere in North America, Central America, or South America.   Or such notional garbage as postulating a German visiting Peru who marries a German living in Canada as being a same-race same-nationality situation, even if one speaks Mandarin and the other Cantonese.   Because we have other context here, luckily enough, we can dispense with such arguments, interesting though they might be..  

This father, Robert, is a 22-year US Army member, a veteran of Vietnam, who became a Magistrate before retiring for good.   The mother, Gladys, was a physical education teacher at one point, who would wind up leading a Catholic Hispanic enclave within a parish as well as the difficult job; raising four children.    And so on and so forth.    

We're in Florida now, and we see where we're going, so let's get to it.


That George Zimmerman is a Latino doesn't make it either possible or impossible for him to be a racist.   The same goes for him being a German, a Peruvian, a Floridian, a resident of Sanford FL, living in the community of the Retreat at Twin Lakes, who he grew up with, who his nana is or who she babysat, who he is mentoring or not, how he acts in public, what he jokes about, or how he dresses.   It doesn't mean he has to be racist and it doesn't preclude him from being racist.     Likewise, reacting negatively to a specific person you don't know (one who fits a group that's often been seen or caught causing trouble where you live or not) doesn't make one a racist.   It doesn't automatically categorically make one a bigot or a profiler or prejudiced.    If you were an XYZ and you saw another XYZ you didn't know acting in some way you thought odd, you might do the same thing after all.   So none of that proves anything one direction or another at all,  altar boy with an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather or otherwise. 

In the US, there has been a history of Black and Hispanic interactions often being strained and stressed.  Better and worse interactions than just stress and strain.     The same goes for any groups that aren't of the same race and ethnicity and nationality and religion.   Black non-Hispanic or White non-Hispanic or Oriental non-Hispanic.  Quaker versus Amish.   Norwegians versus Swedes.   Chileans versus  Argentinians versus Icelanders.  And it's not just limited to the US of course; but we went over all that already.      


So is it possible George Zimmerman got into a situation way out of his league or that a frightened Trayvon Martin preemptively acted with violence or any number of other things?   Just as much as it's possible Zimmerman thought himself superior to African-Americans and that they needed to be discriminated against as not being as trustworthy as Peruvian-Americans?  By chasing them and threatening them with violence?   Of course it is.    Any of it could be true, so what is anyone arguing about.  Right, perception and their own biases on the matter, or because they have ulterior motives or they're simply uninformed.   

As an African-American female neighbor of Zimmerman's allegedly said  "There were black boys robbing houses in this neighborhood.  That's why George was suspicious of Trayvon Martin."      Good point.   Yet even if that's why she'd be suspicious about Martin or she thought that was why Zimmerman was suspicious of Martin -- maybe she's wrong about Zimmerman's motivations herself.   Assuming she's not an invention of the media, maybe what she's doing is  making an excellent point that's unhampered by  potential allegations of racism against her.  On the other hand, if she's not from the same ethnic background as Martin is, she could still be being racist about it, her being black immaterial if he's a different kind of black than she is.   That would only  be more difficult to argue to the public in public, to the people who either don't know what the definition of racism actually is or who don't know all the ethnic variations between African-Americans.    The Sub-Sahara is a pretty big place after all, and so is the United States.    It's not like a Nigerian who has just immigrated to Cedar Rapids is the same as a 3th generation Zambian in Cheyenne  is some 8th generation mixed-race person (that can trace a relative or two back to Sudan) in Los Angeles is some Angolan.

Then we have what Michaela Angela Davis said ""You being a minority doesn't make you immune to racist beliefs."        Well, yes, obviously.   The same goes for the variations too.   You being a minority doesn't mean you have racist beliefs.   You not being a minority doesn't make you immune from racist beliefs or establish you have racist beliefs.  Anyone can be a racist against almost anyone else; anyone else if you include religion, nationality, age, gender, sex, sexual preference, social strata, economic status, choice of music, hobbies....   As so often people using the term racist do so include those things, no matter how tenuous (or even illogical and against the definition of the word) that usage happens to be.

So being a minority doesn't make you immune to being a racist, and vice-versa, etc.    And thinking a person walking in a grassy area off the streets through a neighborhood might be trouble, thinking that doesn't mean any of those things either.   Just like it doesn't not mean them.    This is why there is a legal system to determine these types of things, and sometimes that works despite the efforts of the public, the media, and certain celebrities and activists.

But is it racist?    Your guess would be as good as mine would be; but they're both still just guesses.