The George Zimmerman verdict last night did
not come as much of a surprise. Florida’s
controversial “stand your ground” law offered Zimmerman a fairly solid defense
for last year’s killing of Trayvon Martin.
A cursory look at this morning’s TV and online news offered the
expected. Conservatives are lauding the
jury’s verdict as justice done, while liberals and progressives lament the result
as another step backwards for race relations in America.
George Zimmerman is an unlikely hero by any
standard. The pudgy, sad sack cop
wannabe has had a checkered past which includes charges of domestic violence
and assaulting a police officer. The
fact that Zimmerman killed a minor who was simply taking a shortcut home should
have rendered him wholly unsympathetic in the eye of the public. But the hard truth is that we haven’t
achieved the postracial society some pundits had hailed after the 2008 presidential
election.
In fact, little seems to have changed for the
better. Trayvon Martin’s murder calls to mind the lynchings of the pre-civil
rights era. His crime was being in the
wrong place—an affluent, predominantly white neighborhood—at the wrong
time. Zimmerman had followed Martin,
despite instructions to the contrary from the 911 operator, because he knew
that there would be few real consequences from confronting the “suspect.”
The not guilty verdict proves that we indeed
live in George Zimmerman’s America. As
the well-off retreat into gated communities, as we rely increasingly upon private
security and high-tech gadgetry to safeguard our homes and property, and as
paranoia envelops our culture, it’s perhaps too easy to justify the killing of
a suspicious person. It doesn’t help
that our ingrained taste for gratuitous violence enables us to excuse murder,
particularly when the law (and trial juries) sanction it.
Mr. Zimmerman may be not guilty in the eyes of
the law…but he is hardly innocent. And
neither are we.
