George Zimmerman’s America

After several weeks of speculation, Florida authorities have finally decided to bring charges against George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

Nearly fifty years after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, we are still deeply divided on racial lines.  The emotionally charged rhetoric and media posturing surrounding the Trayvon Martin shooting is depressing evidence that we have a long way to go before we move beyond the mutual suspicions that undergird race relations in this country.

The worst part of it is that Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman have each become depersonalized symbols of our collective fears and resentments.  One side protests the mainstream media’s perceived maligning of Zimmerman’s past, such as publishing a booking photo from an old arrest and its use of a photo of a younger, more innocent-looking Martin.  The other side objects to the presumed racial profiling of community watch programs, the potential for abuse built into Florida’s “stand your ground” law, and the easy availability of firearms in our society. 

On one level, the nitpicking over what has or hasn’t been properly explained or disclosed merely shows the tenuous nature of publicly accepted truths in the media age.  It demonstrates deep antagonisms in the national discourse, but little else.  As for the rest of the affair, it's unfolding according to the unwritten script for these things.  The media spectacle was probably inevitable.  Considering where the incident occurred, the prosecutorial dithering leading up to Zimmerman’s arrest was unsurprising.  In the coming months, we’ll observe seemingly endless pretrial motions and then sit through the trial itself.  Once the verdict’s in, there will be howls of indignation and cries of vindication.  After the clamor finally dies down Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman will become yesterday’s news, forever consigned to being a historical footnote or the answer to a trivia question.

Concerning the question of whether Zimmerman acted reasonably, I suspect a wide swath of the public believes he did.  At least in principle: Reuters reports the majority of people it polled support laws permitting use of deadly force in self-defense.  While I don’t want to digress on our national love affair with guns, it goes hand-in-hand with the assumption that it’s okay to direct violence at people deemed “suspicious.”  A corollary to this premise is that anyone harmed as a result is to blame for their fate.

We’ve been down this path before.  When Rodney King was beaten by LAPD officers during a routine traffic stop the media continually reminded us of King’s past criminal record, as if this somehow justified his abuse at the hands of the authorities.  In a similar vein, Fox News has aired claims that Martin had “assaulted” Zimmerman, which, even if true, blithely sidesteps the fact that Zimmerman had stalked Martin down the street prior to the confrontation.  Even Zimmerman’s neighborhood watch group has said its policy is to call the police when spotting a suspicious person rather than trying to apprehend him personally.  When you consider Zimmerman’s own record of violent behavior, which includes assaulting a police officer, that he would act on impulse to trail Trayvon Martin is unsurprising.  

Florida, its diverse population notwithstanding, is hardly known for racial tolerance.  During the Jim Crow era Florida witnessed some of its worst racially-motivated atrocities, including the Rosewood massacre of 1922.  Contemporary race relations aren’t much better—consider the Liberty City riot of 1980, the Tampa riots of 1989 and 1992, and the St. Petersburg riot of 1996, all of them responses to white-on-black violence.  Frequently the victims of the violence are young men.  Even today, long-ago cases of black youth killed by white cops or vigilantes resurface: Several years ago, the 1967 shooting of 19-year-old Martin Chambers by a Tampa police officer was reinvestigated on the suspicion it may have been unjustified.

Florida is one of several Southern states which deny full civil rights such as the right to vote to convicted felons (who are disproportionately minorities), even after their sentences have been completed.  Florida incarcerates African-Americans at higher rates than the national average.  Florida law also imposes substantial employment and educational barriers to released prisoners, compounding the problem of reintegrating them into law abiding society.  One can infer that Florida’s civil order is rooted in an implicit racism that makes every black person, and particularly every black man, a suspect.  But Florida, or the South for that matter, are hardly unique.  It’s endemic in our national culture.

Like it or not, we all live in George Zimmerman’s America.  It’s an America where one’s very human worth is determined by one’s race, wealth, and social status.  It’s a country where the authorities will take their time investigating a killing or bringing charges against the perpetrator when the victim is a young black male.  The post-racial society heralded by some commentators upon Barack Obama’s election has not materialized.  Perhaps it never will, at least in our lifetimes.  It’s just as unlikely our casual acceptance of gun violence will go away.  It’s but a matter of time before the next Trayvon Martin meets his demise, and the cycle of recriminations with begin again.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar