“You go down there looking for justice that’s what you find: just us,” Richard Pryor.
For a man of color, life in America oft feels like a frightening rollercoaster ride with dangerous traps awaiting you on every hairpin turn. One thing that is made clear at an excruciatingly early age is that because of color, because of race, not only are you different but you will be treated accordingly. And so you grow up being condescended to in conversations, followed in stores, treated with minimal – if any – respect at work and so on. Just because of the hue of your skin or the broadness of your nose or the fullness of your lips, your day-to-day actions will come under greater scrutiny. You are living life under a suspicious societal microscope and caution is not only suggested but for survival’s sake it’s expected. So you develop a hardened shell as much to maintain your sanity as to ward off any external trouble. 'Don’t mess with me, I won’t mess with you' becomes your credo. And you become content with the tiniest of triumphs. All I want to do is get through the day, you tell yourself. And then in the evening you think that all I want to do is live to see tomorrow’s dawn. When you’re a man of color in America, you believe that each breath you take is a victory.
And when that gift of life is snatched away from another person of color, you acutely – almost disproportionately - feel the pain of that loss. In most of those cases, you shake your head about the senseless loss. Sometimes, you even think how that could have been you. But you try not to linger over such thoughts. After all, there’s enough ache in your life. Why invite more hurt into your heart? So you compartmentalize and move on.
Then one day you hear about a 17 year old Black young man, a child named Trayvon Martin, who trying to return to his dad’s home in Sanford, Florida after a snack run is shot and killed because a White neighborhood watch guy – 29 year old George Zimmerman - deemed him suspicious, followed him and, against police advice, confronted him and all the emotions you’ve kept bottled up – a Pandora’s box of tangled, raw feelings – come flooding back. You think of assorted racial confrontations you had at that age. You think how you never once worried about being shot during any of those incidents. You thank God for growing up in a time when guns weren’t as plentiful. Then you think that if you had a son he’d look like Trayvon. A few days later you hear the President – the country’s first African-American commander-in-chief – say the same thing. For some reason, you take this as a good sign so you decide to follow the trial.
When you’re a person of color in America, the decision to follow a trial like this one is not a cavalier one. All too well, you know the capriciousness of the American justice system. You’ve either personally gone through it or known somebody who has and the results usually range from deficient to disastrous. Yet, we keep getting emotionally invested in these types of trials. Like an abused spouse welcoming home her battering husband, we tell ourselves that this time will be different. Justice is blind, we say while forgetting that that sightless gaze is habitually turned in our direction. So you lie to yourself and insist that this time justice will be surely be served.
Then you hear the stalling tactics by the district attorneys as they debate whether or not to bring charges and you start to worry. You hear about the Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law and shudder. You hear the acronym WWB – Walking While Black – mentioned and shake your head in disbelief. You hear from Geraldo Rivera how Trayvon’s wearing a hoodie contributed to his death. You hear the police tape where Zimmerman profanely describes Trayvon walking through his neighborhood before ignoring their pleas to stay put. You hear about how the arriving police cordially and respectfully greeted Zimmerman, the son of a former judge, just a few feet away from Trayvon’s still warm corpse. Then you think that a person of color would have been cuffed on the spot. You see the videotape of Zimmerman going into the police station later that evening and wonder where are the visual signs of all of these injuries he claimed Trayvon inflicted upon him. You hear about the financial war chest Zimmerman is accruing for his defense. You are told that the jury is made up of all females: five White and one Hispanic. You wonder what you are supposed to make out of such information.
You see Trayvon Martin’s parents and know that you could never demonstrate that much class and calm under such tragic circumstances.
Then the trial begins and you immediately notice the prosecution hasn’t brought their A game. You find yourself yelling at the television about unasked questions and obvious follow-ups. You see Travyon’s friend Rachel Jeantel – the one he was speaking to on the phone while Zimmerman followed him – and share her frustration at both the prosecution and defense. Then you later see Jeantel being unfairly vilified on social media by both Black & White folks for her supposed lack of sophistication and erudition. You think about how she literally heard her friend being murdered and wonder how folks can be so cruel with their criticism. Then you realize that Jeantel is a victim of the most common American prejudice: the bigotry of class. Her sin – in the eyes of many of the trial’s onlookers – was in being Black and poor. What she said may not have been purty but her pain – if you cared to listen – spoke volumes.
You watch the defense do what you expected: trash Trayvon. They show scary, blurry photos of Trayvon while putting on the witness stand neighbors who talked about burglaries in the neighborhood committed by African-American men. (Immediately, carrying such a theory to a logical conclusion, you wonder if President Obama, Will Smith, Prince and Clarence Thomas would also be stopped by George Zimmerman.) You hear the screams on the tape and watch both Trayvon’s mother and Zimmerman’s mother claim the screams belong to their child. For you, the answer is easy. Unfortunately, you’ve heard enough pained screams in your lifetime to know the difference between a child’s yell and that of an adult’s. Then you realize you just heard the death scream of a child and your soul throbs again.
Then the trial wraps up and the wait begins. You see Geraldo Rivera claim that the women on the jury would have shot and killed Trayvon a lot sooner than George Zimmerman did. You read social media and see the same phrase over and over again used by people of color: ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this.’ Surprisingly, you don’t. You figure that if Zimmerman isn’t convicted of the top charge of second-degree murder surely he’ll go away for manslaughter. You can’t just kill an unarmed child who you stalked and get away with it, right?
Wrong.
You get a call from a friend on a Saturday night. (A White friend, if it matters.) He sounds angry, disconsolate. He tells you the verdict is in. Not guilty. You’re shocked. While still holding the phone, you quickly put on the television. You see a replay of the verdict being read. The first thing you notice is the unnerving calm of the defendant Zimmerman. This is a man with his entire life riding on this verdict. You would think he would be nervous but he was confidently stoic. It was as if he already knew the favorable outcome and the reading of the verdict was a mere formality. Not guilty. You notice that the second charge – manslaughter – wasn’t even read aloud by the court. Why waste the breath? The not guilty statement covered everything.
Then you watch Zimmerman smile as the defense team hugged Zimmerman’s family. You recognize that smug smile. It’s a smile of pride. “The son of a bitch is proud of what he did,” you tell your friend. “Yep,” he agrees. You talk for a while then you excuse yourself to watch the press conferences. The prosecution – unsurprisingly - comes across as bumbling buffoons straight out of a Three Stooges slapstick short subject. Except there wasn’t a single laugh to be had here: just pain and sorrow.
The prosecution was followed by the defense team: Mark O’Meara and Don West. As distasteful as their trial strategy was, you understood they had to vigorously defend their client. But at the press conference, instead taking the high road, they instead decided to take a victory lap around Trayvon Martin’s dead body. You watch them insist that Zimmerman was the aggrieved party here and that if he were Black, he would not have even been charged. You clench your fists and now understand why Trayvon’s parents didn’t attend the sentencing. It would have been like watching their child get murdered yet again.
You spend the next few days watching the Sunday talking heads play Monday morning quarterback with the case. It shouldn’t have been brought, they say. Don’t blame the jury, they insist. They were just trying the evidence in front of them. The verdict was the only possible one considering the weakness of the prosecution’s case. The case had nothing to do with the ‘stand your ground’ law. (Although the law had been brought up during the jury selection process.) The case had nothing to do with race. This was about self-defense. Period.
Then you later watch Juror B37 – ironically cloaked in darkness to conceal her identity - talk about how she believes Zimmerman’s learned his lesson and how she would feel comfortable having him on a neighborhood watch. You are horrified as you realize Geraldo Rivera was right. You are disgusted when you find out that Juror B37 has signed a book deal to tell about the jury deliberations. Money made off of the blood of a dead Black child.
You turn off the television and seethe. This is the truth as you see it. An African-American young man was racially profiled by a cop wannabe - a judge’s son who only called the police whenever he saw a Black man walking in his neighborhood – followed by him, confronted by him, murdered by him then freed. (In effect, giving a White vigilante the same rights to use deadly force as an officer of the law.) To claim that he was found not guilty because of a jury’s ‘reasonable doubt’ is a canard. As people of color know all too well, many of us have been convicted of much more with far less evidence. It is when we are the victims – and, especially, when Whites are the accused – that the burden of proof shifts. In life in well as in death, people of color are guilty until proven innocent and the shield of reasonable doubt leads to verdicts of unreasonable heartbreak.
In a month when the majority of headlines concerned a female television cook’s use of the ‘N’ word, you have seen the Supreme Court emasculate the Voting Rights Act, the Mayor of New York City defend his stop-and-frisk policy by insisting we don’t stop enough Black & Latinos while stopping too many Whites and a child killer go free. Trayvon Martin wasn’t old enough to go to a bar and in some states, to drive. He wasn’t old enough to serve our country in the military. Perhaps, most importantly, he wasn’t old enough to vote. But his life, his existence mattered and - despite it being snuffed out so tragically – it’s up to us to affirm it in a way that goes beyond memorial T-shirts, wall murals and protests. T-shirts fray, murals fade and crowds disperse as the cause behind them is too-often forgotten. That is until the next tragedy. Not this time. Please not this time. It is time to stand our ground – stand tall on our high, moral ground – to gather emotional, spiritual strength and then politically mobilize to end this madness. Let the murder of Trayvon Martin be the catalyst for true change in this country. For it is only through real action that we can still the sounds of his screams.
