A few days ago, I
received the worst “what if” I have ever heard.
Playing around with
what-ifs is something that you see a lot in journalism. The speculations are
usually casual, thought-provoking, but always in good fun. This one was
decidedly different.
I was chatting with
a professor about the verdict on the Zimmerman trial, and our email exchange
revolved around a single question I had for him: was the decision a result of
the prosecution’s ineptitude to present proof, or was the jury racially
motivated? After some brief thoughts, he closed his response with the
following:
Ask yourself this, Tyler: Do you think
Zimmerman would have reacted the same way if he’d seen you walking through his
neighborhood?
‘Food for thought’
is a little bit of an understatement, no? Keep this in mind while we backtrack
a little bit here.
What we had here
with this trial was the apparent murder of a young black man by a half-white,
half-Hispanic neighborhood watch volunteer. Trayvon Martin was unarmed, and
George Zimmerman carried an automatic weapon. The prosecution needed to show
that Zimmerman had malicious intent in confronting Martin, and the defense
needed to show that Martin had only been killed in self-defense—that the young man
had instigated the violence himself. At its roots though, this was a murder
case.
Sounds strange,
does it not? After all, what were the predominant themes in the media during
this whole trial? The jury is all female. There are no black people on the
jury. Zimmerman was half-white and Martin was African-American.
The questions were
worse. Was Zimmerman a racist? Was Trayvon asking for it? Should these
neighborhood watch volunteers have guns in the first place?
The real question
should be this: Are we not missing something? A young man is dead! The person
of Trayvon Martin, amidst all of the race questions and observations, was
totally lost, and it was not the first time we saw something like this.
Remember the O.J. Simpson trial? Instead of the focus being on the horrible
passing of two people, all you heard about were the white folks crying for an
outrage and the black folks cheering on “their man” as he attempts to outrace
the police. A time of mourning became a time for this inflated racial competition
of sorts.
Is this not what we
saw again here with Zimmerman? If the man was convicted, it was a victory for
blacks, a chance for some sweet justice after so many lifetimes and generations
of Rodney Kings and Emmett Tills. This may be largely justified historically,
but as we saw in the Simpson trial, there have been times where it was more
about beating the white folks and less about seeing justice for the deceased.
Of course, in the incidences like the Rodney King beating, the opposite was true
for whites—no justice, just an opportunity to show people who was in charge.
Back to the
what-if. If George Zimmerman saw me
instead of Trayvon Martin, the answer—undoubtedly and assuredly—is that he does
not give me a second thought. Instead of rousing suspicion, I am allowed to go
home and eat my Skittles and drink my iced tea and live out the rest of my
young adult life unconscious of my inadvertent advantages. There is no death,
no trial, no rousing national debate. Instead, fate was wicked enough to drop
Trayvon Martin at the wrong place at the wrong time, and now we face the
consequences of one man’s assumptions—whether he was aware of them or not.
What exactly these
consequences entail joins the list of ugly questions that America faces in the
wake of this ordeal. It is easy to point at history and say empty things along
the lines of, “But look how far we’ve come. But look where we were. But it was
so much worse.” But—but—but nothing. We live in a time where homosexuals can
marry freely, women regularly head major corporations, and a non-white
individual sits in the most powerful position on the planet. A black teenager
should be able to walk home and eat his candy in peace. We should be able to
observe critical trials without making racial alliances. We should be able to
mourn the lives that were lost without any mind toward skin color. In this
country, our desire to beat out “the other guys” in the justice system
overshadowed the tragic death of a teenager. Sure does not sound progressive to
me.
For weeks and weeks
now, we heard that we needed justice for Trayvon Martin. Whether you believe
the courts gave it to him or not does not matter now. What does matter is that
America never gave him justice. Instead, we were blinded by color, and we
failed to honor a bright young life or mourn the loss of a hopeful future.
There was never
justice for Trayvon Martin, not from us, not from the courts, not from anyone.
We have the
capacity to be better than this, but in these racially-sensitive situations, we
have not shown it. What happens next is up to us—there is no formula, no
instruction manual, no guidelines. It comes down to us being decent people, and
remembering the decent people behind all of these tragic stories. We have to
remember that this is not about race—it is about people.
Only then can
justice truly be served.
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