I really dont like all this hate against my state.

[Igel]

65. It's emotionally satisfying.

It gives a focus to the hate, anger, and frustration that people feel over what's mostly a symbol of the fear they have locally. Of their own kids being killed--we'll say by "racist whites" when the odds are that any black teenager that's killed is killed by another black under the age of 30, but to focus on that too much feeds the stereotype of black criminality and lawlessness.

It's one reason for having to make TM a virtuous innocent. He's 17, a junior, and one of the dominant images when pre-trial was of him a few years younger and smiling and looking like an African-American Donny Osmond. We play down anything bad and justify it because it makes him more innocuous, less of a person who might be seen as threatening. And his image is "everyblacks'" image. Post trial, the dominant image of him was in a hoodie, face distorted by the fish-eye lens, not smiling. He had to be an off-stage actor in a morality play.

Then there are fears of being unemployed. Of losing one's home. Of being suspected of doing things and being humiliated. Real fears.

It finds an excuse for the problems, preferably one that's far away, preferably one that they can collectively muster the power to overcome but if they can't it's not a meaningful loss. If they can whip the Florida racists, perhaps things can change locally. If they can't, well, nobody really thought they could.

(I could, oddly enough, write the same thing about the Tea Party folk. Lots of fears, externalizing the problem and making the problem into some institution with a racialist premise, taking on a large symbolic problem in the name of the American Way that they can't probably beat but in which a loss is not a defeat. People are people and we've been doing the same kind of game for millennia.)