Last night, as the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial was announced, my 12-year-old daughter became an American in the fullest sense, by which I mean she has been introduced to the workings of a system for which she is hardly to blame, but which she has inherited nonetheless. It is a system that fails black people with a near-unanimity almost incomprehensible to behold. The family of Trayvon Martin is only the latest battered by the machinations of American justice. They will most assuredly not be the last.
To watch her crumble, eyes swollen with tears, is but the latest of my heartbreaks, as is telling her everything will be okay, only to hear her respond, “No it won’t be,” and realizing she is the more perceptive one. Parenting books do not tell us how to handle moments like this, and so I sputtered something about the struggle being a marathon rather than a sprint, but it all seemed inadequate to the moment.
I know some would admonish me for suggesting this case was about race. George Zimmerman, they insist, didn’t follow Trayvon Martin because Martin was black; he followed him because he thought he might be a criminal. Yes, but if the presumption of criminality was attached to Martin because he was black, and would not have been attached to him had he been white, then the charge of racial bias and profiling is entirely appropriate. And surely we cannot deny that the presumption of criminality was dependent on this dead child’s race, can we? Even the defense did not deny this. Indeed, Zimmerman’s attorneys acknowledged that their client’s concerns about Martin sprang from the fact that young black males had committed previous break-ins in the neighborhood.
George Zimmerman justified following Martin because, as he put it, “these fucking punks” always get away. He saw Martin as similar to those who had committed previous break-ins. But what behavior did Martin display that would have suggested he was criminally inclined? Zimmerman’s team could produce nothing to indicate anything suspicious about Martin’s actions that night. According to Zimmerman, Martin was walking in the rain, “looking around at the houses.” But not looking in windows, or jiggling doorknobs, or anything that might have suggested a burglar. All we know is that Zimmerman saw Martin and concluded that he was like those other criminals. To the extent there was nothing in Martin’s actions that would indicate he was another “fucking punk,” the only reason Zimmerman would have seen him that way was that Martin, as a young black male, was presumed a criminal. It’s the way he viewed most any black male in the neighborhood, even children as young as nine years of age, on whom he had also, previously, called 9-1-1.
Which is to say, Trayvon Martin is dead because he is black and George Zimmerman can’t differentiate between criminal and non-criminal black people. Which means George Zimmerman is a racist, because if you cannot distinguish between black criminals and everyday kids, and don’t even see the need to try, that’s what you are. I don’t care what your Peruvian mother says, or your black friends, or the black girl you took to prom, or the black kids you supposedly mentored.
And if you defend his decision to follow Martin—without which decision the latter is still alive—then you, too, are a racist. You are suggesting it is acceptable to think the worst of any given black person because of the actions of entirely different black people. You are saying, at that point, that so long as some black people commit crime, and do so at a statistically disproportionate rate, no black person can be presumed innocent: a conclusion that is morally repugnant and makes a mockery of the principles by which this nation’s people claim to live.
Even if we believe, as the jury did, that Zimmerman acted in self-defense, were it not for his racially biased suspicions, Trayvon Martin would be alive. It was Zimmerman who initiated the drama that night. And even if you believe that Martin attacked Zimmerman after being followed by him, that doesn’t change.
But that mattered little to this jury, and even less to the white reactionaries quick to praise their decision. To them, the fact that Martin might have feared Zimmerman, and might have thought he was standing his ground, confronted by someone who was “up to no good,” is irrelevant. They are saying that black people who fight back against someone they think is creepy and following them, who might intend them harm, are more responsible for their deaths than those who kill them. What their verdict says is that I can start drama, and if you respond to the drama I created, you are to blame for what happens, not me.
Of course, this logic would never be used to protect a black person accused of such an act. For instance, it is impossible to imagine this standard being applied to Bernhard Goetz in 1984. Goetz was the white man in New York, who, afraid of young black men because he had been previously mugged, decided to shoot several such youth on a subway. They had not threatened him. They had merely asked him for money and teased him. Nonetheless, he drew his weapon and fired several rounds into them, even (according to his first account, later recanted), shooting a second time at one of the men, after saying, “You don’t look so bad, here, have another.” Goetz, predictably, was seen as a hero by the majority of whites. He was Dirty Harry, fighting back against crime, and more to the point, black crime. He too would successfully plead self-defense and face conviction only on a minor weapons charge.
But let us pretend that after Goetz pulled his weapon and began to fire at the young men, one of them had drawn his own gun. As it turns out, none of the boys had one, but let’s pretend that one of them pulled a weapon because he and his friends were being shot, and fearing for his life, he opted to defend himself against this deranged gunman. And let’s pretend the young man hit Goetz, perhaps paralyzing him as Goetz did to one of his victims. Does anyone believe that that young black man would have been able to press a successful self-defense claim in court the way Goetz did? Or in the court of white public opinion the way Zimmerman has?
We don’t even have to travel back thirty years to the Goetz case to make the point. We can stay here, with this case. If everything about that night had been the same, but Martin had pulled a weapon and shot Zimmerman out of a genuine fear he was going to be harmed, would the claim of self-defense have rung true for those who are presently convinced of it? Would this jury have concluded that Trayvon had a right to defend himself against the perceived violent intentions of George Zimmerman? Would he have been given the benefit of the doubt the way Zimmerman was by virtually every white conservative in America? We know the answers to these questions.
We know because we have an entire history to tell us what time it is. That history has made it clear that when white folks kill or maim black people they will always have plenty ready to defend them, or at least to find nuance in the act, in ways no such complication need attach when the killer is black or brown. Those who now slander Martin, even in death, and rationalize his killing remind us just how little black life matters to some, and how little it has always mattered to them.
These are the ideological soul mates of those who insisted Emmett Till really did say “Bye, baby” to Carolyn Bryant, as if this could even theoretically justify shooting him and tossing him in the Tallahatchie River.
They descend from those who insisted against all evidence that Dick Rowland really did attack Sarah Page in that Tulsa elevator. Thus it was necessary to burn the black Greenwood district of the city to the ground in retaliation.
They are the fetid offspring of those who stood beneath the swinging bodies of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, whom they had lynched, content in their certitude that they had—again, evidence be damned—raped a white woman.
They are the vile and reeking progeny of those who regularly conjured justifications to affix black bodies to short ropes dangling from tall trees, to burn them with blowtorches, chop off body parts and sell them—or pictures of the carnage—as souvenirs.
They are the odious inheritors of a time-honored and dreadful tradition in which virtually no white person’s misdeed against a black person can simply be condemned for what it is, and then have such condemnation followed by a period at the end of the sentence.
