It seems like the most natural thing in the world, now, to be outraged by this story. To be outraged by the actions of George Zimmerman, who made a hobby of looking for trouble, and when he didn’t find it, brought some to 17 year-old Trayvon Martin, and who.To be outraged by the conduct of the Sanford Police, who took Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense at face value, without even asking “From what? Hollow-point Skittles? Full Metal Snapple?”
It seems like the most natural thing in the world to feel bitter, heart-wrenching pangs at Trayvon&
This is the essence of the oft-misunderstood term “white privilege,” which is that even the least fortunate among us take for granted things that black people cannot. These don’t feel like privileges, because they’re really not, they are things that ought not be denied to anyone. It doesn’t feel like a privilege to catch a taxicab, or to walk around a store without being constantly watched and shadowed, or not to fear that any encounter with police could escalate to lethality… or to send your child to the store for a snack, confident he’ll return home without being mistaken for an imaginary criminal.
But Trayvon Martin had to check a lot of boxes to become the worthy focus of national attention. He was killed on February 26, and
The first time I heard about Trayvon’s killing was on The Young Turks, whose first segment on the story was on their March 8 web show, and at that time, Trayvon was still a sweet-faced young man who was gunned down holding nothing but his cellphone, an iced tea, and some Skittles he bought for his little brother, Chad. George Zimmerman was still a free man, despite having killed the young man after confronting him, in defiance of police instruction.
The Sanford Police, though, were refusing to release the 911 tapes, despite pressure from family attorney Benjamin Crump, and other community leaders. It was a compelling story, but not compelling enough to overcome the strong urge to deny the racism in our midst, the one that led many to conclude that Rodney King deserved the beating he got because “you have to watch the whole tape!“, the one that places the rationale “He was probably guilty of something” in the minds of otherwise decent folks. There was still some wiggle room to hold onto, if only the thin excuse that “I guess we’ll never know…”
The following week, Trayvon’s story began to garner more attention, as attorney Crump and members of Trayvon’s family worked tirelessly to get Trayvon’s story out, to pressure the police department to act. Appearances on Current, CNN, and MSNBC began
Those tapes moved Trayvon’s story into a near open-and-shut space, wherein even if you were in such denial that you weren’t quite convinced that race played a part in Zimmerman’s actions, the nonexistent value that the police placed on Trayvon’s life was undeniable. The tapes also added a gripping element of drama to the coverage that was as stark as it was sickening. His story reached all the way to the White House, where Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked about it twice this week. Trayvon Martin is closer to getting a measure of justice than he was before, and people are learning an uncomfortable truth about being black in America, even in 2012, even with a black president. This will never come close to being a fair trade, but better than the alternative of a tragedy ignored. If you take away one of a number of variables, though, that’s exactly what would have happened. If Trayvon Martin wasn’t a sweet-faced teenager, if he wasn’t just carrying snacks and a cellphone, if there weren’t a slew of 911 recordings to paint a clear picture of what happened to him, what would the result have been?
As soon as I heard those gut-wrenching screams for help, my thoughts turned to my own angel-faced 18 year-old, whom I
But I also thought of an old friend, an employee of mine when I ran a video store in a predominantly black neighborhood. His name was I.E., and he was not an angel-faced teenager. Dark-skinned and in his early twenties, I.E. was known to sport a giant ‘fro when he wasn’t rocking thick cornrows, and he always had a growth of thick stubble to go along with his default facial expression, the scowl. In short, I.E. was a scary-looking guy, and he wasn’t an angel. He liked to smoke a fair amount of weed, and wasn’t all that fond of the police. But he was also a really funny guy, hard-working, and could be counted on to have your back when you needed him.
If I.E. had met up with George Zimmerman (and Zimmerman somehow managed to avoid having that 9mm shoved up his ass), how different would this story be? What if he was shot dead, and instead of holding Skittles, he was holding a couple of joints? No grieving parents, no angelic file photo, no gut-wrenching cries for help.
Trayvon Martin’s story had to be