We walk blindly, moving forward into the past
This is my second column about the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case. The case is the stuff of drama. In short order, a movie will come of it. Zimmerman will write a book and shall be the temporary saint of the White conservative lecture circuit before slipping into a paranoid, forced anonymity. What will not happen is Travyon’s family seeing him again, except for the image he left in the corridors of their memories or the photographs they keep.
However, I haven’t returned to this matter because of the individual trauma involved. I hold to this case because of its wider social and political consequences.
Racism lives. This means the Black race remains endangered although not sufficiently alert to the trouble at hand. The trouble is not that of extermination or physical slavery as centuries ago. The danger is that of a sense of crippling inferiority. This sense is perceived and acted on but no longer formally acknowledged by either side of the racial divide characterizing Black people’s historic relationship with mostly White America and Western Europe.
Because of the power differential that has existed for half a millennium, the two races view each other differently. To put it mildly, Blacks generally respect Whites but that respect is not reciprocated in equal portion. Each race stereotypes the other. The stereotypes Blacks hold of Whites are, to a large degree, authored by Whites. Therefore, the stereotypes are generally positive. Even the few negative biases amount to critiques that Whites have taken to the extreme what otherwise would be a virtue. Thus, the spirit of exploration becomes one of aggression, conquest, and colonialism. The belief in the primacy of science and technology to improve our material wellbeing becomes unbridled. It turns into the malpractice of distorting our environment and endangering our wellbeing through the very technologic and economic processes once touted as harbingers of a benign future. Any trouble with Whites it is not because they are bad but sometimes they are too much of a good thing.
Stereotypes affixed to the Black race trend in the opposite direction. While Whites may overload on a fine thing, Blacks are characterized by multiple depravity. Our affluence lies in our nothingness. Almost every dysfunctional, criminal attribute known to man is viewed as our quiddity. While Whites are presumed the best, we are adjudged the worst even before evidence is adduced.
Intellectually, most people know theses stereotypes are minatory and inaccurate. However, psychology often trumps intellect. After quickly acknowledging the mistakes of this line of thought, people turn back to the wrong ideas in order to embrace them. They find it is easier to live within the comfortable bounds of wrongful convention than to live outside of comfort yet be right.
The trial of George Zimmerman must be viewed through this perspective if it is to be viewed with perception. Zimmerman is White and Martin was Black. The former killed the latter under questionable circumstances. In America, the clash of White and Black is rarely coincidental. It is a function of a history of racial animus and of the stereotypes that animus has brewed over generations.
However, the prosecutors, the defense team, and the jury — all of whom were White — all claimed the case had nothing to do with race. While these people may have been in the courtroom, they did not understand the trial or their role in it if they honestly believed their disavowals. For them to say race played no role is worse than disingenuous. They engage in a most dangerous form of chicanery. They lied knowing it was a lie but feeling in their gut that the lie was better than the truth. They dare not admit Zimmerman’s racism because they believed in what he did. They supported it not because of the governing laws on the books but because of the subconscious racism that governs their perspective of the world and that raises the hair on their backs whenever they see a Black person in a situation or position they do not associate with blackness.
For them to admit Zimmerman’s prejudice would be to admit then try to discard their own. They have no reason to attempt such a thing. Their racism is a comfortable garment worn so long and that fits so smugly that they don’t notice it. It is part of them; it is them. To remove their prejudice would be tantamount to amputating a limb. They see no benefit in undergoing the painful operation for a dead black boy.
For them, the lie that was the verdict worked because it returned the world to its proper balance. Zimmerman walked free, acquitted of killing an unarmed Black teenager. Confined forever to his grave, Martin was deemed culpable in his own homicide. Because of his race, the murdered was considered his own de facto killer. In effect, the jury decided the young man killed himself, that he basically committed the social equivalent of suicide, just because he did not bow to Zimmerman’s command.
Zimmerman was not cloaked with legal authority to command anyone to do anything. However, the jury believed Martin’s status as a Black teenager automatically relegated him to a status were he should have obeyed Zimmerman or face the consequences of a real but unspoken law that has shaped the contours of American and world history for centuries. Perhaps the young man was not fully cognizant of his actions. Resisting Zimmerman’s encroachment into the quiet enjoyment of his personal space, the boy rebelled against the great weight of history.
He might have thought this was a simple one-on-one confrontation. When race is involved nothing is simple and cast in isolation. Everything is tied to history and touched with larger meaning. Superficially, Trayvon was felled by a single bullet. In a more profound sense, this unwitting rebel was interred by the weight of a lopsided, unfair history; his actions were deemed improper by the legal system of a society that had already adjudged him guilty of some wrong by reason of his very existence. To be a young Black man is to be a criminal in waiting. According to the system, Trayvon got what he deserved and Zimmerman was unduly victimized for doing his civic duty containing this human form of the Black Plague.
Most White Americans support the verdict exonerating the gun-toting Zimmerman; it accords with their racist perceptions of justice. They proclaim race did not play a role in the case. To admit that race was a factor is to confess to a problem. Why would they utter such a confession when the outcome was the desired one, as in the days of old before Blacks acquired civil rights?
Most Blacks are appalled at the verdict; they sense its ugly ramification because they will bear its lethal brunt in the years to come. The nation is slowly but perceptibly returning to its former self where the door of justice was open to Whites but shuttered to Blacks. What the verdict says is that a Black person peacefully walking the street can be accosted by a White intermeddler. Unless there are objective witnesses around, the intermeddler can have his way with the Black person. The Black will be blamed for whatever happens to him. The verdict is an open invitation for White vigilantes to descend on any solitary black man who happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. The woods of southern states are littered with the corpses of Black men killed this way in years past. We come full circle back to this danger that made many Black men run home before sundown less he be caught, never to be seen above ground again.
In a way, those who say race did not play a role in the case are right. To say it played a role is such an understatement as to be a lie. Race did not play a role in the case: Race was the case.
Without the Black/ White divide, there would not have been a fatal confrontation. If Martin had been a White teen, Zimmerman would not have pursued him. However, based on the belief that some Black criminals had committed robberies in the area, Zimmerman concluded Martin was one of them. According to Zimmerman, the boy was walking too slowly. Who said there is nothing new under the sun? Low and behold, there is a new rule. A Black person can now be found guilty for walking below the limit permissible for him. In Travyon’s case, the penalty for this seemingly minor infraction was his very life.
Twenty years ago, Zimmerman’s actions would have been known by its truer name: racial prejudice. Today, it is called justifiable pragmatism and deemed a civic service.
In a certain sense, the verdict was foretold at the point that the prosecution team was picked. Prosecution lawyers made a jumble of the case because their hearts were not in it. They wanted Zimmerman to walk free. Their efforts were lame ones of merely going through the motions. The prosecutors knew their lives and status in the White community would be at risk if they sent Zimmerman to prison. The local White community wanted Zimmerman off and the prosecutors did what they could to oblige their neighbor’s wishes.
As such, they were not prosecutors; they were like underpaid actors performing a secondary role just so the play could go on. After all, why risk their status? Travyon was dead. Nothing they did would bring him back. A vigorous prosecution would just make them pariahs in the community. Thus they behaved like the prosecutors in the Old South over fifty years ago when criminal cases were first being brought against Whites for violence against blacks. They tripped and fumbled through the case so that Zimmerman could walk and they could receive the silent, implied tribute of a community happy that the Black menace had received its just comeuppance. The clock always ticks but sometimes, sometimes, its hands move backward to return us to a past that never should have been.
Enter into the fray President Obama. Immediately after the verdict, he issued a terse, anodyne statement that the jury verdict stands and must be respected. He is consistent in that his usual knee-jerk reaction to first assuage White conservatives was not placed out-of-joint by the case. However, Black and youth frustration has been mounting against him and the overall turn of events and issues in the nation. People have taken to the streets in protests. The nation is one incident away from a riot in a major city.
Apprehended by the prospect of a race riot and being almost screamed at by a Black community waiting for him to show a little soul in office, the President issues a better still incomplete statement July 19. In that attempt, he tried to thread the needle to douse the frustration of the Black community without upsetting the satisfaction of the White at the verdict. For him, the attempt was a painful one in which he tried so hard to find the right words that he did not say all he needed to say. Historians of the moment will enjoy the irony of a Black president fidgeting to contain African American anger.
He eloquently mentioned some poignant but relatively petty instances of racism he and other Black high-brows have suffered. He did this because he was not really speaking to the nation. This address was to Black people in particular. The subliminal message was that he was one of us and thus we should not go too far with the protests and demonstrations less we make his job harder. He was pleading, “give a brother a break!” Most people will be taken in by his tact but a growing number no longer see him as a brother. They will not relent to give him any break. They will see this as moment when the Black community just might emerge from protracted stupor to fight to keep the little it has. If that means the man in the White House must experience a bit of sweat under the collar, so be it. His salary is sufficient to take his apparel to a good dry cleaner.
In the end, he ran into a wall of his own making. While trying to explain the social and political ramifications of the case, President Obama maundered haltingly at moments. He knew what he should say but he could not bring himself to uttering the word that needed to be said repeatedly. He dared not use the word “racism” too often. Instead he spoke of this harsh, flinty reality in soft euphemisms like “historic incidents and antecedents.” Give the rest of the brothers a break, Mr. President! If you can’t say racism is alive, real and killing people, then you have not lived up to the moment and to the unique responsibility you have chosen by commanding the desk in the Oval Office. You remain a standard politician, a man who is black but ill at ease with being a black man.
It is not that you are bad but that you have sidestepped the higher purpose of your mission because fulfilling that purpose comes with political price you deem too costly to bear. You want everyone to love you. In the end, everyone will remember you by half, as an elaborate incompletion.
On one level, the case is a simple criminal trial in Florida. On another level, it is universal warning. Racism is not only afoot, it is armed and claiming ground lost in recent decades. This affects not only Black America but Blacks everywhere. Zimmerman shot Travyon because the boy decided to be his own person and stand his ground. This is a metaphor with larger political and economic significance. As they strive to define themselves and stand their ground, Black people and nations will be accosted. The very prejudice that excused Zimmerman’s behavior now fuels increasingly overbearing and paternalistic Western economic and political policies toward Africa. Leaders of those African nations that tow the line, doing sheepishly as instructed, will get a pat on the head. Their people, however, will be asked to sup on the ash and dust of their poverty. Those people and nations that seek to stand will have a tough time of it. Yet, dignity and justice are worth the fight. In the years to come, we shall see of what material we are made. We shall see if we lower our heads and bury our dignity because we eschew the fight. Or will we have the courage of that solitary teenager who stood his ground because he had done nothing wrong except seek to find his way home.
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