The only two people who conclusively know what happened the night Trayvon Martin was killed are Martin and George Zimmerman. Since Martin is dead and Zimmerman has a vested interest in his own innocence, we can never fully know what happened that night. While we do know some facts, we don’t know all, including some information from the trial that was not made public. Yet many people in this country have already made a decision as if they had all the facts. This is a disservice to the fairness, i.e. justice, they supposedly seek.
The one thing everyone can agree on is that Martin’s death is a terrible tragedy. A 17-year-old dying in any way is a devastating loss. While some offer lip service to this, truly believing it should prevent us from politicizing Martin’s death as well as claiming it as one’s own for any purpose. His death really only has to do with his family, and they should not have to witness the appropriation of his son or his image for any reason. Sadly, a child’s death brings out the worst in some people.
In writing this, I do not intend to argue for any side, for the rightness or wrongness of the verdict, or for my interpretation of the events. I seek, hopefully successfully, to offer an objective analysis of some of the factors surrounding this event. To that end, I will state now what I think about the verdict. To get it out of the way. You be the judge if it colors too much of the rest of what I have to say. I think Zimmerman should have listened to the 911 dispatcher when he/she (?) told him to not approach Martin. However, he did not break a law in so doing (stupidity isn’t a crime because our prisons are already overcrowded). As I stated already, what actually happened then is unknowable, except for the fact that Martin wound up dead from a bullet from Zimmerman’s gun. From what I read about the trial, it seemed like the prosecution didn’t have a case. Whether they didn’t have a case because there wasn’t one or because of poor execution is something that’s speculation, which again is fueling so much of the reaction to this case. This issue should have been settled with a wrongful death lawsuit, which I’m sure will happen. Regardless, the issues this case brings up are what need to be discussed. In open, honest, free-from-political-and-personal-agendas fashion.
Release of pent-up rage and the enduring problems of our past sins.
There are some angry people in this country. And from some of the actions and words of some of those angry people, it’s clear this isn’t a rational anger. Joe Madison, a morning-drive Sirius radio show host, called the whole thing a “modern day lynching.” Al Sharpton has said his National Action Network will hold protests in 100 cities. Then there were the violent protests in California. I’m not going to get into that anger. I bring it up to point out two things: One, this anger shows that certain reactions to the verdict have nothing to do with the verdict itself, but stem from other issues. Two, this country continues to pay for its past racial sins. We’re at a point so removed from those initial sins that we can no longer get to the bottom of things. We can no longer fix the original problem. It’s like a feud between two people over a couple of bucks that goes on for years and years. If one wants to settle the couple of bucks that started the whole thing, that offer will most likely be rejected because of all the hurt and fighting that occurred between the original incident and the present.
The media.
I stopped watching the news about ten years ago. It was no act of gallant protest; I simply found better, more accurate news online and in newspapers. I saw local newscasts here and there over the years, but I was floored how much “news” had changed a year or two ago when I went to the gym around 6 pm. As I ran on the treadmill, the local ABC news played on one of the TVs lined up in front of the treadmills. I had watched this news growing up. The anchors, weather(wo)men, and sports anchors were as familiar to me as family members. I saw them more than some family members. So it blew my mind when I saw what the news had become: reports on what was trending on Facebook, story after story about crime and every conceivable tragedy that was happening in the city, and an unreal focus on celebrity news. This wasn’t news; this was a show. It was pure entertainment, and with many of the crime stories, lowbrow, sensationalist entertainment. I felt like a spectator in the Coliseum, frothing and screaming for more blood. This is what has happened to news in this country. It’s turned into a story, into a show. News outlets vie for your attention just as sitcoms and reality shows and movies do. What this ultimately does is turn you into a voyeur, a disconnected, static viewer of real events. Reality becomes unreality and that disconnection, and the horror of what you’re watching, removes you from the community the news should create. So a young black kid is tragically killed in Florida, and a person sitting in Reno gets pissed because he thinks it has something to do with him. He’s as pissed as a character he related to dying in a show he enjoys. The disconnect of news as entertainment doesn’t spur him to reflect, but to react. And as humans we first react emotionally. Thinking comes later. But we’re being conditioned for that later to never come.
The role of the internet.
The internet is a wonderful thing. Sometimes I can’t wrap my head around the fact that it exists, and what it can help us do. Pretty much the entire world’s information available upon demand. It’s mind-reeling. But unlimited choice requires one simple payment: discrimination. An information-seeker must discriminate between bad and good information; between timeless and ephemeral information; between true and false information. The speed in which we can access the internet doesn’t foster discriminatory reading. Tap tap, ENTER, click and we have information and we go with it. Only in the age of the internet would a news anchor report racist names for the pilots of the Asiana jet that crashed in San Francisco. I bring up the current nature of the media above and here the blistering speed and unlimited choice of the internet to make the point that our world is being shaped at breakneck speeds. Reflection is a key to humanity, and to humanity’s success. Humans are able to sit down and count the cost, to weigh the options. In our current calls for justice for Trayvon, perhaps we should think about the scales that Lady Justice holds. Balancing those scales is not something to rush.
The problem with self-identification.
I’ve always found self-identification with a group to be kinda weird, especially when it has something to do with an innate characteristic. I’m Mexican, but I don’t really care what’s happening to Mexico. I’m left-handed, but I haven’t lobbied Congress for affirmative action laws to mandate the manufacture of left-handed scissors. I want to tread a fine line here, because outside of my own experience (I’m at least 8 nationalities, maybe 9, and my parents never celebrated or even acknowledged any of them, except maybe the Mexican. My dad made fun of my mom for being Mexican, and she kept a few Mexican knickknacks around the house. Who you are, in that sense, isn’t important to me because it was never made important to me.), I understand why some people do self-identify with certain things that they had no control in choosing. If I was born in another country and moved to America, I’d hold pride in where I came from. If I could trace my ancestors in a fairly straight line from one country to another and through major historical events, I’d be pretty happy to identify with that ancestry. The problem in America is that there’s not enough identification as American and too much identification as every possible sub-genre imaginable. The reason this is a problem is selfishness. Wouldn’t our country benefit from identifying with what we’ve built here, and what we’re building – America – and not with what we self-identify with? It seems to me to be more democratic, more inclusive to identify with what we share, a homeland, than with what makes us different. Now, I am not saying we forget who we are and where we came from. I’m not advocating a nationalistic blind zeal for the motherland. But we are off-balance with this, and a balancing would do much to take the self out of the equation in a pursuit of the betterment of all of us. So as this relates to the Martin case, one’s blind identification with Martin can lead to some wild conclusions. Martin’s family’s attorney, Benjamin Crump (wasn’t he a Dickens character?), said, “Trayvon Martin will forever remain in the annals of history next to Medgar Evers and Emmett Till as symbols for the fight for equal justice for all.” Sorry, buddy, but Trayvon and the circumstances around his case are nothing compared to what happened with Evers and Till. Evers was a well-known fighter for equal civil rights for blacks, and as such was targeted. He was a soldier in a nonviolent war who was murdered in cold blood. Till was killed only because he was black. Martin was not killed because he was black. How much his race factored into his death can be debated. But he was not killed because he was black. Our past racial sins have caused many to retreat into their own camps, to self-identify as Black or as White. Though while those distinctions have their importance, they do not define all. When they do, we will only see the entrenchment of each camp, and the hostility towards the other grow.
Black culture, specifically young black culture.
There’s a problem with young black culture. Yeah, I said it, and more people need to. I’ve taught in nearly-exclusively-black schools for nine of my ten years teaching. As it pertains to this point, I’ve learned two very important things: One, the reason for so many underperforming black schools and students (the so-called achievement gap) has nothing to do with the race of the kids. Two, the reason for so many underperforming black schools is the lack of guidance for young black kids, especially males. White and black schools and students are falling behind in America. My purpose here isn’t to trace the causes and effects of all of that. But I’ve seen so many bright students with true potential meander through their schooling, falling to learn anything of use in the competitive marketplace. They graduate, if they do, without the skills necessary to build a life that keeps on building, doomed at a young age to a certain station in life. And a major factor is who is guiding them.
The biggest problem is lack of fathers. I’m constantly amazed at the resourcefulness and power of single mothers, but imagine that power combined with the power of another individual. The importance of a father cannot be underestimated. The guidance and strength that a father offers meets a fundamental human need. When that father is absent, or if present and doesn’t provide what the child needs, other things fill the gaps. Women, drugs, alcohol, etc. Too many of my students are getting into things that a still-forming brain cannot handle. No one is there to deter them, to steer them towards something healthier or to teach them how to have a healthy relationship with things that can turn unhealthy. Sometimes schools or rec centers or relatives fill this gap, but the child knows that’s not a permanent thing. A child may receive the guidance and positive influence he needs at school, but then he goes home. And that’s where real life happens.
The culture of the streets is one of those things that fills the absent-father gap. This culture is embodied in rap music. Now, I love rap music. It’s all I listened to as a teenager, and while I’m not as much into it now, there’s still a lot of it that I count as my favorite music. But I don’t live that music. It doesn’t reflect my life. Frankly, I don’t pay much attention to the words, but more the beat and the flow and sound the words. I’m able to make that distinction because the message of the words has no resonance with me. It did as a teenager, but that was stupid, immature infatuation with things I had no idea about. The music I listened to didn’t define me because I lived in a world different, and in some ways better, than the world of rap. I do know that if my immature adolescent infatuation had not been headed off – by college, by parents, by other guiding people and things – I might have become something detrimental to my long-term success. I don’t want to go to far with this and imply that rap music causes these things. I don’t believe artistic expression, no matter how commercial, causes things. But they do influence. They do reflect. They do cause a ripple like a stone thrown in a pond. Not paying attention to that ripple, or even worse, discounting it, slops mud on the problem, thus obscuring any accurate reading of and therefore solution to it.
Before I go further with this, let me come back to Trayvon. Because Trayvon wore a hoodie, because Trayvon smoked weed, because Trayvon had a picture of a gun on his phone in no way can be construed as reason for him to die or for him to be followed on that night. Absolutely no way. Yet that thought resides in the hearts of many white people whether they want to admit it or not. Trayvon is a modern-day boogeyman. He’s what white people fear. And while they are wrong to harbor that fear, to not root it out, and to act on it, however subconsciously, the fact remains that young black culture has embraced and aped a criminal lifestyle. Their music glorifies it; their entertainment fills their minds with it; it’s all that interests them. Their heroes are those that preach the gospel of violence, drugs, promiscuity and misogyny towards women, and “me against the world” mentality that directly ostracizes them from society, white or black. Yet there’s a portion of black society that embraces this image, that uses it to define themselves. We now have a president who has embraced Jay-Z as a role model (not his words, but if your president, especially the first black one, talks about his liking Jay-Z, then what are you as a young person supposed to think?), Jay-Z being the same person whose lyrics are vulgar, misogynistic, and violent. Jay-Z has become an amazingly successful businessman, but he hasn’t renounced what got him there. He hasn’t turned legitimate. Instead, he has brought the streets to the White House. He has exalted everything that is low. Some might tie everything Jay-Z is to the American Dream, to black people in general – “Look at what one of our own, from one of the lowliest places, has done! He’s gone so far!” – but in so doing it ties the crime and the violence and the drugs and misogyny to black people too. It’s a terrible image perpetuated by those that don’t have to deal with that image anymore. Jay-Z escaped the streets. But what about all those that don’t? Do they need to hear that what they see in front of them is good? No, they need to see that they have it within them to do better, to leave all that behind and become something completely different. Still black, still true to who they are, but better.
Trayvon Martin did not deserve to die that night. If he was truly doing nothing wrong (which question will always remain unanswered because Martin is now dead and Zimmerman’s motives are compromised), then he did not deserve to be followed. But white and black Americans both need to do some soul-searching. The assumptions whites make about young black males needs to be obliterated with love. Blacks need to stop embracing things that feed into those assumptions. It’s a cycle that as it seems now, no one is willing to break.
Note: This above topic is extremely hard to write about. It’s so complicated, and been made even more complicated by so many disparate voices, that it’s hard to stick to one idea, to fully vet it out. But to get at what I’m getting at a bit better, take a look at Fox Sport’s Jason Whitlock’s reason articles. He’s pretty much spot on:
Turning the other cheek (which doesn’t mean lay down and die).
In order for that cycle to be broken, blacks need to turn the other cheek. Before I explain further, I’m sure an immediate reply to that sentence would be: What about whites?! I’m not letting whites off the hook. But the power here, despite what it may seem, resides solely with black people. Racism is a human condition. It resides in the heart of every human being. Just like any other human flaw, no man or law or system can destroy it. Its influence may be able to be reduced by laws or the changing of norms, but it will always exist. White people, on a personal level, need to commit to not feed into racist thinking, to be circumspect to catch any thought that smells of racism, to live the Golden Rule, not in any childish Sunday School way, but in an everyday grind kind of way. That might not be enough for some people, but it’s all we got.
So yeah, blacks need to turn the other cheek. This does not imply that they become punks or bitches or Uncle Toms. This does not imply lying down. It means that with their attention away from the problem – racism – they then have the focus and resources to improve their lot. Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver both advocated for blacks to make concessions in social and political areas in order to advance in economic areas. The underlying principle of their point of view is that all men love the color green. Black people need to realize this: they will never win; they will never one-up the white man; the white man’s sins will never be fully punished. But no matter. As bitter a pill that is to swallow, it will go down so much easier in the place of personal and race-wide success.
The idea of a post-racial America.
The idea of “post-racial America” gets floated around a lot these days. This is a ridiculously erroneous idea. Race will always matter. It’s what people see. Humans see a presentation of a person first – race, size, clothing, etc. – and make an assumption. It’s human nature, and while many times it’s wrong, nothing will change it.
Waiting for, or arguing for, or advocating for a “post-racial America” is like planning on buying your retirement house in the Hamptons, ordering your super-yacht, and scheduling your years-long cruise around the world before you get your first job. We need to work for the here and now, correcting our behaviors, absolving of self, acting in true love before we hope or even talk about any kind of far-off utopia.
Us vs. them
The lingering tragedy of this type of situation is that it perpetuates an us vs. them mentality. For those living in this mentality, the verdict was a call to join your side, raise your flag, and defend your side to the death. No matter if your side lost its moral voice a long time ago. No matter anything. Just be loyal and die if need be. In an era in which our entertainment no longer shows the simple dichotomy of good guy vs. bad guy, but instead shows that any good guy and any bad guy is really a war within himself of both sides, we seem in our society to stick to the simple dichotomy of black and white.
Bellicose Blatherings 
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