Emmett Till is back in the news. This being the case, the inevitable comparisons of Till with Trayvon Martin will start up again. My purpose is to provide you with some background so that you can appreciate just how inane the comparisons are that assimilate the defensible killing of Martin by George Zimmerman to the unspeakably brutal and unjust torture and slaying of Till. Anyone who assimilates the two is not exaggerating, but lying shamelessly. To understand this one need only know the essentials of each case. Here are a couple of videos to bring you up to speed on Emmett Till. I follow them with some commentary.
The Death of Emmett Till (Bob Dylan)
The importance of self-control
There is so much to learn from the Trayvon Martin affair. One lesson is the importance of self-control. If Martin had been taught, or rather had learned, to control himself he would most likely be alive today. But he apparently wasn’t and he obviously didn't. He blew his cool when questioned about his trespassing in a gated community on a rainy night. He punched a man in the face and broke his nose, then jumped on him, pinned him down, and told him that he was going to die that night. So, naturally, the man defended himself against the deadly attack with deadly force. What Zimmerman did was both morally and legally permissible. If some strapping youth is pounding your head into the pavement, you are about to suffer "grave bodily harm" if not death. What we have here is clearly a case of legally justified self-defense. Zimmerman was rightly acquitted.
Does race enter into this? In one way it does. Blacks as a group have a rather more emotional nature than whites as a group. As a group, they are not as good as whites at deferring gratification and controlling their emotions. (If you deny this, you have never lived in a black neighborhood or worked with blacks, as I have. You are probably a rich white liberal who, all her life, has never had to test her feel-good, bien-pensant nostrums against gnarly reality.) It is also well-known that blacks as a group are far more criminally prone than whites as a group. Anyone who thinks it racist to point out such an easily documentable fact is confusing facts about race with racist facts. It is a very simple distinction and no one has any excuse for failing to understand it or, what is far worse, to understand it but willfully elide it.
So, while self-control is important for all of us, the early inculcation of self-control is even more important for blacks.
Hard looks, hateful looks, suspicious looks — we all get them from time to time, but they are not justifications for launching a physical assault on the looker. The same goes for harsh words.
If you want to be successful you must learn to control yourself. You must learn to control your thoughts, your words, and your behavior. You must learn to keep a tight rein on your feelings. Unfortunately, liberals in positions of authority have abdicated when it comes to moral education. For example, they refuse to enforce discipline in classrooms. So liberals, as usual, are part of the problem.
But that is to put it too mildly. There is no decency on the Left, no wisdom, and, increasingly, no sanity. The mindless, race-baiting comparison of Trayvon Martin with Emmett Till is just one example among hundreds. But perhaps I should put the point disjunctively: you are either mentally defective if you make that comparison, or evil. That an inclusive disjunction.