The cartoon is admittedly flawed because it spelled Martin’s first name incorrectly and it used a phrase (“colored boy”) that is offensive and could have been avoided (“black teenager.”) …
Posts tagged "trayvon"
I wanted to say I am very sorry for the loss of your son. I did not know how old he was. I thought he was a little bit younger than I am, and I did not know if he was armed or not.
George Zimmerman unexpectedly apologized to Trayvon Martin’s family in court today.
Almost certainly, Zimmerman is being honest in what he said to the family of his victim. it would be difficult not to feel sorry for shooting and killing someone, and not solely because of the terrible consequences for Zimmerman himself. But that doesn’t mitigate how badly the apology was done. A good apology would be the first sentence. “I wanted to say I am very sorry for the loss of your son.” Full stop.
Moving forward, attempting to explain why he shot Martin, does no one any good. It doesn’t help the family and it doesn’t help Zimmerman. Nor does it actually explain the shooting. Leaving aside the jurisprudential issues (as Zimmerman’s defense likely hinges, at least in part, on whether or not he had reason to believe that Martin was armed), would Zimmerman feel less sorry if Martin had been older? Would the family’s loss be lessened if Martin had been closer in age to Zimmerman? Certainly not.
It is almost always the case that less is more when it comes to making an apology.
Click here for more excerpts from George Zimmerman’s apology to Trayvon Martin’s parents, prosecutor’s questions.
On occasion I have failed to provide appropriate verbal attributions on my radio broadcast, Richard Land Live!, and for that I sincerely apologize.
That’s Richard Land, the Southern Baptist Convention’s top public policy ethicist.
Here’s the reason for the apology:
The plagiarism came to light when Baptist blogger and Baylor University Ph.D. student Aaron Weaver posted a partial transcript from one of Land’s shows on his blog, TheBigDaddyWeave.com. The unattributed remarks were made on Land’s March 31 show about media, race and Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black Florida teenager who was shot and killed by a neighborhood security guard.
Weaver discovered that more than half the material for Land’s short segment was quoted nearly verbatim from Jeffrey Kuhner’s March 29 Washington Times Op-Ed, “Obama foments racial division.”
After that discovery, Weaver listened to the third hour of the same program and discovered that Land again used unattributed material, this time from an article in “Investor’s Business Daily.” He discovered a third example in Land’s Feb. 4 show in which Land quoted from a Washington Examiner editorial.
Here’s some context for the remarks, as well as some info on what you’re missing if you don’t regularly tune in to Land’s show:
In his radio show, Land described activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as “racial ambulance chasers” who, along with fringe groups like the Black Panthers, are fomenting a “mob mentality” in the Trayvon Martin case that is akin to what the Ku Klux Klan used to do to blacks in the South.
More here (HT: Laura Seay).
Geraldo Rivera apologizes again … this time, to Trayvon Martin’s parents.
This apology is certainly better than the last one — which wasn’t an apology at all — but it’s still a contingent apology; he’s still apologizing if he hurt anyone’s feelings or added to anyone’s misery, two things he clearly must know at this point that he did.
He’s still not apologizing for what he said about the hoodie being as sure a cause of Martin’s death as George Zimmerman, who actually shot him.
HT: PoliticalProf.
Here’s the apology from Stephanie Eisner who drew a terribly racist cartoon about the Trayvon Martin tragedy in The Daily Texan:
“I apologize for what was in hindsight an ambiguous cartoon related to the Trayvon Martin shooting. I intended to contribute thoughtful commentary on the media coverage of the incident, however this goal fell flat. I would like to make it explicitly clear that I am not a racist, and that I am personally appalled by the killing of Trayvon Martin. I regret any pain the wording or message of my cartoon may have caused.”
This is the cartoon:
The full article is here.
Nirak also sent along the above apology from the cartoonist, and added some further information (via Pandagon), namely an “apology” from staff advisor Doug Warren:
Of course, as Nirak points out, “Oh, wait, I guess that last one wasn’t actually an apology.”
Yep. Not at all.
I Deeply Apologize To The McClain Family For Retweeting Their Address.It Was A Mistake.Please Leave The McClain’s In Peace.Justice In Court
— Spike Lee (@SpikeLee) March 29, 2012
The “mistake” is outlined in this March 27, 2012 piece from The Smoking Gun:
With Twitter and Facebook continuing to explode with posts purporting to contain the address of George Zimmerman, property records and interviews reveal that the home is actually the longtime residence of a married Florida couple, both in their 70s, who have no connection to the man who killed Trayvon Martin and are now living in fear due to erroneous reports about their connection to the shooter.
The mass dissemination of the address on Edgewater Circle in Sanford—the Florida city where Martin was shot to death last month—took flight last Friday when director Spike Lee retweeted a tweet containing Zimmerman’s purported address to his 240,000 followers.
[…]
The residence on Edgewater Circle is actually the home of David McClain, 72, and his wife Elaine, 70. The McClains, both of whom work for the Seminole County school system, have lived in the 1310-square-foot lakefront home for about a decade, records show.
The thing is, Lee was just wrong to retweet the address. Even if it had been the correct address, it’s still an incredibly irresponsible thing to do because it seems to be encouraring people to take the law into their own hands.
The word “mistake” implies that the retweet was an accident, like he hit the button unintentionally … in which case it probably wouldn’t have taken so long to apologize, since apologizing for having done something accidentally is relatively easy. It’s much more difficult to say that the emotions he felt about the Trayvon Martin shooting briefly led him to encourage people to harass George Zimmerman at his home.
“I apologize to anyone offended by what one prominent black conservative called my ‘very practical and potentially life-saving campaign urging black and Hispanic parents not to let their children go around wearing hoodies,’” Rivera wrote in an email to Politico.
(via The Atlantic Wire, March 27, 2012)
