Helen Thomas

Meat-eating, gun-slinging rocker Ted Nugent, who reportedly had once called Trayvon Martin a “Skittles hoodie boy” and an “enraged black man-child,” said that America’s “black problem” could be remedied if America’s blacks focused their energies on being “honest” and “law-abiding.” At a concert in Ireland, Bruce Springsteen dedicated a song in the name of “justice for Trayvon Martin.” And million-selling R&B artist Akon wrote that “Every African-American in the United States needs to move their money, family, knowledge back to Africa were you will be treated like the royalty you are.”

On Facebook, a black man who presumably has no idea what it’s like to live a single day as a black man in sub-Saharan Africa wrote an open letter to George Zimmerman stating that Zim would be cursed for life to “feel what its [sic] like to be a black man in America.” On television, rumpled and nearly senile MSNBC host Chris Matthews apologized “for all white people” about the Zimmerman verdict to a pair of black pundits. College professor Michael Eric Dyson suggested to a TV talk-show host that more white children needed to die before white Americans could understand the scourge of racism. “It’s beyond logic. It’s about rationality,” said the college professor, seemingly unaware that the two terms are synonymous. Anthea Butler, a professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania”€”an Ivy League school, mind you”€”said that the deity who hovers over America is a “white racist god with a problem.” Former NBA superstar “Sir” Charles Barkley bucked the tide, saying he agreed with the verdict and that “when race gets out in the media…I don’t think the media has a pure heart, as I call it….I don’t think the media has clean hands.”

US Attorney General Eric Holder told attendees at an NAACP convention that the Justice Department continues to investigate George Zimmerman for civil-rights violations regarding Trayvon Martin’s shooting. And on Friday, President Barack Obama held a White House press conference to state that “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago” while he chided those who dared to mention “statistics” regarding race and crime.

ATTACK OF THE RACIST ASPARAGUS
David Olander, a member of University City, Missouri’s Human Relations Commission, made headlines after confronting an employee at a grocery store in a black neighborhood about whether a dry batch of asparagus represented racist hatred against black people. Olander noted that a batch of asparagus he’d seen at a store in a white neighborhood had been kept fully hydrated. This prompted the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to write what is possibly the most scorn-worthy headline of the year so far: “Dry asparagus prompts questions about racial discrimination in University City.”