Is the grievance industry trying to create a racial Shroud of Turin?

The Smithsonian wants to display the hoodie worn by Tayvon Martin the night he was shot by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. Really, is this what we need now? A modern-day abomination: a Turin Shroud for race-mongerers? Will this become a place of pilgrimage for people looking for reasons to hate?

George Zimmerman was found not guilty of murder by a jury in Florida. The system worked. Now that has not prevented race-hustlers from Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to the New Black Panther Party from trying to capitalize on Martin's death for profit and politics.  But does a previously well-regarded federally-funded museum now have to join the carnival acts?

From Fox News:

Lonnie Bunch, director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture told The Washington Post Martin's hoodie represents an to further the discussion about race in America.

"It became the symbolic way to talk the Trayvon Martin case. It's rare that you get one artifact that really becomes the symbol," Bunch told the newspaper. "Because it's such a symbol, it would allow you to talk about race in the age of Obama."

Bunch, who has acquired a guard tower from Louisiana's Angola State Penitentiary and the handcuffs used to restrain Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 2009, said he'd like to have the hoodie for his collection once the legal case is over.

Attorney General Eric Holder has been promoting the idea that we are "a nation of cowards" when it comes discussing race relations. President Obama has piled on over the years. First, when his Harvard Law friend Henry Gates was detained by the Cambridge police because it appeared he was breaking and entering what eventually was identified as his own house. At the time, Barack Obama denounced the Cambridge police for having "acted stupidly" and referred to a history of racial profiling in America. Probably that was about personal pique since Gates was his friend.

Obama was criticized then for his intemperate and inaccurate remarks -- the police officers were cleared and the notoriously insular (a former aide said of Obama that he "does not like people") president was forced to host a beer summit to make amends.

Not having learned from the embarrassing experience Obama again interjected himself in a state criminal case when he commented about the Tayvon Martin case, "if I had a son he would have looked like Tayvon," and that Trayvon "could have been me 30 years ago."

For years America has been lectured by President Obama and his hand-picked officials about the racism that they think is pervasive in America. Opposition to Obama was due to racism (that should be the motto for MSNBC); opposition to ObamaCare was equated with racism (HHS Secretary Sebelius); support for voter integrity laws was bringing back the Jim Crow era, according to Democratic National committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and others; Vice-President Biden told African-Americans that Republicans wanted to put them back in chains. The Tea Party was filled with racists and its members spit on black Congressmen (a canard that was disproven-too late to prevent damage-just like the IRS targeting).

Basically, any reluctance to vote for his Obama and any resistance to his agenda was characterized as being racist.  Our leaders told us so.

That is certainly one way to shut-down conversations about race: constantly accuse whites of racism and depict America as one giant Ku Klux Klan empire.

So what has this race-hustling accomplished over the last 5 years?

Arnold Ahlert answers the question at Front Page Magazine: Obama, Holder, Sharpton, Jackson and other leading lights have harmed race relations in America:

A new poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal reveals that public perceptions about race relations in America have taken a devastating hit since the election of Barack Obama. At the beginning of the president's first term, 79 percent of whites and 63 percent of blacks had a positive view of American race relations. Those numbers have plummeted to 52 percent and 38 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, 45 percent of whites now consider race relations fairly or very bad, compared with 20 percent in 2009, and the negative views held by black Americans has jumped from 30 percent to 58 percent. Thus, the idea that the election of Barack Obama would usher in a golden age of so-called post-racial relations has exploded. And the president and his administration bear the lion's share of the responsibility for lighting the fuse.

The Obama administration ginned up the Trayvon Martin controversy down in Florida through a little-known agency of Holder's Department of Justice. But that is but one example of how Obama and his allies have made race relations far worse than they should be at this point in our history.

The racial grievance industry is one sector of the economy that flourished in the Age of Obama.

Why let facts get in the way of a narrative tale of racism that is meant to bolster Obama's base in the run-up to the midterm elections and distract people from the real scandals of the Obama administration that are multiplying as fast as the national debt?

George Zimmerman is not a racist. The FBI has investigated that issue. As a matter of fact, Zimmerman -- had he been black (and he is in part) -- could have been a poster child for the NAACP as he had done far more than Tayvon Martin to help the black community ( see "Stop the Zimmerman Debates" by Deroy Murdock in NRO for a run-down of Zimmerman's good deeds-an aspect of his life that the media has completely ignored since effigies have no need for a resume to be attached to their chests).

And now a taxpayer-funded institution, the Smithsonian, wants to join the fun by making a martyr of Martin.

That will just memorialize something that should not be memorialized and given the honor of being displayed as part of American history: a lie about race relations in America.