ricardienne | I can't even. (Reply)

Am I overreading, or is David Brooks saying in pretty clear terms: "Poor George Zimmerman! Back in the good old days, there was a place for manly white men and their vigilante justice protected white women from scary brown men. But now the world is feminized and all about *feelings* and there's no place for them anymore. Don't you feel the moment of manly tragedy?"
But there's no need to even call Brooks a racist sexist chauvinist pig. He basically does it himself.

"...Edwards spends much of the film in pursuit of an old-fashioned honor killing. At least at first, he doesn’t want to rescue his niece; he wants to find her and kill her to enforce his brand of racial and sexual purity.

Classics can be interpreted in different ways. These days, “The Searchers” can be profitably seen as a story about men who are caught on the wrong side of a historical transition."

Or it could be seen as a racist, sexist product of its times, which reveals just how myopically and problematically focused on the viewpoint of its most privileged segment that society was. Oh wait, that would make it a product of our times, too.

"...Edwards can’t cross the threshold. Because he is tainted by violence, he can’t be part of domestic joy he made possible. He is framed by the doorway and eventually walks away."

Who is harmed white men's (totally justified) violence against people of color? White men. How are they harmed? By being cut off (in a totally manly way) from "domestic joy"? What is "domestic joy"? White women safely inside the house.

"That image of the man outside the doorway is germane today, in a different and even more tragic manner."

You mean, because today, racist white men who kill people are invited into the metaphorical house to be the guest of honor at the party?

"...there has been some ineffable shift in the definition of dignity. Many men were raised with a certain image of male dignity, which emphasized autonomy, reticence, ruggedness, invulnerability and the competitive virtues. Now, thanks to a communications economy, they find themselves in a world that values expressiveness, interpersonal ease, vulnerability and the cooperative virtues."

I. just. NO. No No No No No. Fuck you, David Brooks, for romanticizing white supremacism, for trotting out all the classic racist tropes as cultural touchstones, for coming up with the absolutely worst derailing apology for George Zimmerman ever, for not extending even a fraction of a moment of thought for what this is actually about. A young man was murdered by one your heroic white vigilante killers, and what was surprising about this case is that it even went to a trial, not that the prosecution of his murderer turned into, essentially, a posthumous trial of Trayvon Martin for the crime of being a black male. Not that his parents had to watch their son's murderer be vindicated by an American "justice" system that works on exactly the racist, sociopathic assumptions you think are so pretty through your rose-colored glasses.