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Zimmerman-Martin: The Class Angle

John Derbyshire

07/09/2013

Having sprouted from British roots, I’ll admit I’m more susceptible than average to the notion that all social stories are about class.

So I liked Daniel Greenfield’s comments on the Zimmerman case.

Zimmerman is the latest Bernie Goetz … It’s not that the two men had anything particularly in common. Unlike Goetz, it is very unlikely that Zimmerman jumped the gun, so to speak, but they both fill a similar niche. They represent the embattled lower half of the middle class.

To understand the Zimmerman case, you have to live in a neighborhood that has just enough property values to keep you paying the mortgage and just enough proximity to dangerous territories to make you feel like you're living on the frontier.

That puts it in a very American context, too: back-country pioneers fighting off the aborigines. (The Scotch-Irish were particularly good at this because, as Leyburn points out, they had spend a previous generation or three as settlers in Ulster fighting off the “wood-kerns,” i.e. dispossessed Catholic Irish.)

The chain of events doesn’t make much sense to the elites, which is one reason why they assume that the explanation must be racism … It’s doubtful that anyone in Zimmerman’s neighborhood who weathered multiple break-ins has much sympathy for the Martin family. And that’s one reason that the prosecution hasn’t found any useful witnesses.

I noticed incidentally that last night’s Pix-11 News here in New York was still showing the “angelic” picture of Trayvon Martin aged 12. Full screen. No others, just that one.

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