A black teen was shot and killed while the person that fired the shot got off scot free UNTIL people started getting mobilized on the issue. It literally took months of public pressure to even get a charge filed, muchless a conviction that Jorge never got. This is not something unique to this case and pretty much the MO whenever a black person is shot by a white person or person in authority. Not that anyone should be listening to Kobe about anything other than basketball, but the fact that black people have been on the ass-end of these kinds of things should demonstrate the difference between solidarity and groupthink. If Kobe was looking to add nuance, he certainly failed regardless of his stance on the the case. By the time the Heat wore those hoodies, there were plenty of facts at the time.
Even if the outcome was unjust, the fact that the case was tried, and found Zimmerman innocent at least lends credence to the thought that the first investigators didn't think a chargeable crime took place, so I'm not sure I'm totally on board with saying the demonstrations and outcry leading to charges was what was just. I truly don't know. I go back and forth on the whole case to be honest. No need to re-hash it all here, but the end result was that a jury found Zimmerman innocent.
But the thing that really gets me is that you compared the New Black Panthers to Stormfront. Seriously dude, scale is totally out of whack there and the stuff coming from Stormfront is (not)surprisingly close to general sentiment about the case. That should set off some alarms, right there. We had people unironically talking about Purple Drank and weed turning someone into SuperNegro(tm).
Sorry, I don't know if this is directed at me, or maybe I missed a post? The New Black Panthers are a bunch of losers and asshats, this much I believe, but I don't recall mentioning them. They're highly irrelevant to me, until someone elects to give them 5 minutes of coverage. I don't know who/what Stormfront is.
As for the not-black-enough thing, well, he's been "Kobe" for so long that he's probably forgotten what it was like to be Kobe, if he even ever existed. I was never a fan of his anyways.
And that's fine, nobody says we need to give athletes any kind of attention or weigh their opinions, although I'd suggest Bill Russell, Kareem, Charles Barkley, Muhammad Ali, and a host of other athletes have given us meaningful opinions on society from their soapbox that sports allowed them. But as someone who is well educated on the topic of race relations, and race issues, you wouldn't agree that regardless of the reason to say someone isn't black enough, or doesn't fit within the African American experience umbrella is a terribly hurtful, unjust, morally wrong thing to say?
I know you don't honestly believe that a person born an African American could be considered "not black". If he wasn't recognizable (and there are probably places he's gone where he's not) he's still going to get followed around at stores, pulled over more frequently than white people, "fit the description" of a criminal in the area. That's inescapable because of our messed up society and his skin color. Explain to me what he needs to do to be "more black".