no rights which the white man was bound to respect

by Ron Powell

 

Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), was a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court held that African Americans, whether slave or free, could not be American citizens and therefore had no standing to sue in federal court....

Writing for the (7-2) majority, Chief Justice, Roger B. Taney, said, "the authors of the Constitution had viewed all blacks as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

However, when Judge Debra S. Nelson, decided to bar any reference to race or racial profiling in the trial of George Zimmerman, she was most assuredly concurring in a ruling, rendered nearly 160 years ago, which, now, is widely regarded as the worst decision ever made by the Supreme Court.
When the jury of six Sanford women, who, in my view, are the visceral benefactors of racism, rendered their "not guilty" verdict, as a matter of logic and, to a great extent law, they were simultaneously rendering a judgment against Trayvon Martin...
For in order to find Zimmerman "not guilty" they must of necessity have determined Martin to be "guilty", albeit posthumously, of assault with deadly force...This is the conclusion that must be reached while deciding that the use of deadly force against him, in self defense, was justified...
No way that their non-racist, unbiased, and completely objective decision would be influenced by the prospect of facing the ire and wrath of the white residents of Sanford who would, no doubt, castigate, excoriate and ostracize them, should they bring in a guilty verdict, whether it be a compromise or not...
In determining that the death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman was an act of self defense, and therefor justifiable homicide, they not only declared Zimmerman to be "not guilty" but "innocent", which carries a different kind of moral weight...In essence, they too, were concurring in the Supreme Court opinion that insisted that black people, "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

Zimmerman clearly concurred in that opinion when he took it upon himself to act as police, prosecutor, judge and jury as he executed Trayvon Martin for being where he didn't belong ...He knew that in doing so, he would be treated by the Sanford law enforcement authorities as though the young black man he had shot and killed "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Which is why the police saw fit to release him the night of the fatal incident purely on the strength of his story of being attacked by this black kid wearing a hoodie....
In his Dred Scott opinion, Chief Justice Taney went on to list the "horrible consequences of negro citizenship" as part of his argument based on the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV, stating what the Court considered to be the inevitable and undesirable effects of granting Scott's petition  for freedom:

"It would give to persons of the negro race, ...the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, ...to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased ...the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went."

This sentiment, articulated well over 150 years ago, reverberates today in virtually every "all white" community, church, country club, cook-out, cocktail party, executive suite, and lunch room. It also is a dominant motivating factor in every state that is now controlled by a Republican legislative majority and/or Republican governor whose political practices and governmental policies serve little more than to concur in Justice Taney's now defunct opinion that, people of color, black people in particular, "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."
                                                                                                                                                                
Here's a couple of interesting and curious coincidences:
Samuel Nelson, one of six the concurring justices in the Dred Scott Decision....
Debra S. Nelson, presiding judge in the Zimmerman trial
Sanford is a name common to both cases....