Our blood should boil when a white man likens the prosecution of 34-time felon Donald Trump to the injustices experienced by Black people under Jim Crow
Written By Zack Linly
(Source: Newsone)
Black people should be furious at the way Republicans and white conservatives keep mocking us to our faces.
It should make our blood boil when members of the GOP liken the prosecution of 34-time felon Donald Trump to the injustices experienced by Black people under Jim Crow. Black people all over the diaspora should be enraged every time Trump compares himself to Nelson Mandela. Black Americans, in particular, should get beyond heated when they trot out their fictional version of Martin Luther King Jr. in order to lecture Black people about how to behave, or when they compare themselves to Rosa Parks every time they’re held accountable for something.
And we should all be enraged beyond measure about Newsmax host Greg Kelly for having the unfathomable causality and the most vulgar kind of dishonesty to compare Trump being found guilty by a jury of his peers to the brutal murder of Emmett Till.
Yes, you read that right.
Kelly’s display of unconscionable anti-Black / pro-white hate gaslighting began with the ridiculous argument that Trump can’t be judged by a “jury of his peers” because he has no peers because he was the president. That’s just another variation of Trump’s own argument that the sitting president should have absolute immunity against prosecution of all crimes, which is a sentiment not a single Republican would have even uttered while Barack Obama (or any recent Democrat for that matter) was in office. In any case, he’s not the sitting president and wasn’t sitting when he was convicted.
“You see, a jury did it. A jury, a jury, a jury. That’s a jury of [Trump’s] peers,” Kelly said. “Number one, he doesn’t have any peers. He’s a former president. It is a unique position. Constitutionally, we really do have impeachment for offenses by him, that was an appropriate forum. They did it often enough, right? But not this. But you notice, like, you know, a jury of his peers, a jury did it, a jury did it. I’ve heard that excuse before.”
Now, Kelly could’ve just stopped there—then he would have only been guilty of the same garden-variety fact less reporting that is to be expected from discount Fox News networks like Newsmax. It would have only needed to be pointed out to Kelly that a presidential impeachment does not hold a president criminally responsible for criminal acts. But KK-Kelly needed to take it further—he needed to pretend that one of the most cruel, merciless, depraved and monstrously racist acts of violence ever to be committed against a child is comparable to a wealthy white man who served in the USA’s highest office being found guilty of falsifying business records in order to cover up hush money payments to a prostitute.
“Emmett Till, young man, beaten to death all the way back in the 1950s,” Kelly continued. “What did he do? He said hello to a white woman, something like that. And an all-white mob beat him to death and three people, I believe, were arrested. And the jury said, ‘we don’t see no problem here’ and let him go, right? A jury of the accusers’ peers found nothing to see here. So jury, I’m told, gets it wrong sometimes. Seems to be a lot of people who think that a lot of murderers were let free that day. All right, so we’ve seen this before.”
So, first—just because I’m annoyed by it—let’s start with the inaccuracies that indicate Kelly didn’t even bother learning Emmett’s story before making this absurd, irresponsible and racist AF comparison. Only two men, not three, were arrested after taking part in the torture and killing of Emmett Till. It wasn’t an “all-white mob” that physically attacked the 14-year-old, it was only Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, who acted on the word of Carolyn Bryant Donham, who was never arrested, tried or in any way held legally accountable for her role in Emmett’s death.
Kelly was correct about one thing though: “We’ve seen this before.” However, we sure as hell aren’t seeing it now via the conviction of Trump. We saw similarities to Emmet’s case before Emmet’s case ever happened. We saw it when no members of the actual “all-white mob” that committed the Tulsa Race Massacre were criminally held accountable for it. We saw it via the hundreds of anti-Black lynchings that went unpunished during the era of Reconstruction and Jim Crow. The Black history that white conservatives refuse to allow to be taught unrestricted is full of examples of Till-like cases that we’ve “seen before”—like cases where an all-white jury in the Jim Crow acquitted white men in the Jim Crow South who committed violent crimes against Black people in the Jim Crow South.
While the jurors in Trump’s case in New York remain anonymous, considering Trump’s attorneys were present for and participated in the selection of all of them, there’s no reason to think his jury was racially, religiously, demographically or politically stacked against him. (Also, you know, he’s rich, he’s white, he’s and adult, and he wasn’t viciously dragged out of his home in front of his family members, mercilessly beaten to death and thrown in a river.)
What happened to Emmett Till is a thing I would not wish on anyone—absolutely anyone.
Greg Kelly is testing me on that, though.
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