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Trayvon Martin and the double standard
Trayvon Martin: Reactions, black vs. white (1st comment)
Maria Thompson Corley
The recent shooting death of the unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin by a self-appointed white vigilante in Florida makes little sense unless you embrace the idea, espoused by such commentators as Geraldo Rivera and Thomas Sowell, that a young black man in a hoodie shouldn't be surprised when people assume he's dangerous.
This notion is particularly disturbing to someone like me, a mother of a young black man who, like most people under 30, wears a hoodie. Malcolm walks slowly, and, due to his autism, puts the hood over his head most of the time. (I think he finds it comforting.) Like many other people on the autistic spectrum, my son also tends not to answer "Why?" questions— they're too abstract.
Jesse Washington, a race and ethnicity reporter with The Associated Press, wrote last week about the age-old black male code, according to which black men are advised to behave compliantly with police, be extremely alert in affluent white neighborhoods, and to go out of their way to appear non-threatening.
Conservative columnists like Jonah Goldberg and Cal Thomas, on the other hand, complained that the Trayvon Martin controversy was exploiting the "race card," and that this case wasn't necessarily any different than any other case where an unarmed person was shot.
Memory of lynchings
Let's not be disingenuous here. Race is very important to this case. Ideally it shouldn't matter that Martin was black and his assailant, George Zimmerman, wasn't. But Zimmerman's being something other than black resonates deeply with black people, because lynchings are never far from our consciousness; in most of those cases (like this one, so far), the perpetrators were never brought to justice.
It's heavy baggage, but all groups have baggage, and while it would be nice to be free of it, bumper stickers like the current anti-Obama slogan, "Don't Renig," reinforce a painful truth: Some people out there still hate us— not for what we do, but for who we are. That bumper sticker reminds us that, for some people, no matter what we do, how we act, or what we wear, we'll always be niggers.
That dehumanizing designation, unfortunately, infects the black community as well. As some conservative columnists have pointed out, young black males are more at risk of being killed by young black males than by white people. It's a result of a pattern of institutionalized abuse that began with slavery; the emotional and physical abuse take their toll, and the psychological effects are passed on from generation to generation.
School massacres
On the other hand, in this age of school and college shooting sprees in places like Littleton, Colo. (1999), Red Lake, Minn. (2005), the Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pa, (2006), Virginia Tech (2007), Northern Illinois University (2008) and Chardon, Ohio (2012), I can't think of a black person who went to a school with a loaded gun and committed mass murder. Those and literally dozens of other school shootups since 1970 occurred almost entirely in small towns where blacks can barely be found. (For a complete list, click here.) I can only think of two black serial killers: Wayne Williams in Atlanta and the D.C. sniper.
The difference is that when a white male commits serial murders or rapes, people don't start profiling all white males— they try to be specific. If whites looked at black people that way— as individuals— Trayvon Martin might still be alive today.♦
To read a related comment by Robert Zaller, click here.♦
To read a response, click here.
This notion is particularly disturbing to someone like me, a mother of a young black man who, like most people under 30, wears a hoodie. Malcolm walks slowly, and, due to his autism, puts the hood over his head most of the time. (I think he finds it comforting.) Like many other people on the autistic spectrum, my son also tends not to answer "Why?" questions— they're too abstract.
Jesse Washington, a race and ethnicity reporter with The Associated Press, wrote last week about the age-old black male code, according to which black men are advised to behave compliantly with police, be extremely alert in affluent white neighborhoods, and to go out of their way to appear non-threatening.
Conservative columnists like Jonah Goldberg and Cal Thomas, on the other hand, complained that the Trayvon Martin controversy was exploiting the "race card," and that this case wasn't necessarily any different than any other case where an unarmed person was shot.
Memory of lynchings
Let's not be disingenuous here. Race is very important to this case. Ideally it shouldn't matter that Martin was black and his assailant, George Zimmerman, wasn't. But Zimmerman's being something other than black resonates deeply with black people, because lynchings are never far from our consciousness; in most of those cases (like this one, so far), the perpetrators were never brought to justice.
It's heavy baggage, but all groups have baggage, and while it would be nice to be free of it, bumper stickers like the current anti-Obama slogan, "Don't Renig," reinforce a painful truth: Some people out there still hate us— not for what we do, but for who we are. That bumper sticker reminds us that, for some people, no matter what we do, how we act, or what we wear, we'll always be niggers.
That dehumanizing designation, unfortunately, infects the black community as well. As some conservative columnists have pointed out, young black males are more at risk of being killed by young black males than by white people. It's a result of a pattern of institutionalized abuse that began with slavery; the emotional and physical abuse take their toll, and the psychological effects are passed on from generation to generation.
School massacres
On the other hand, in this age of school and college shooting sprees in places like Littleton, Colo. (1999), Red Lake, Minn. (2005), the Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pa, (2006), Virginia Tech (2007), Northern Illinois University (2008) and Chardon, Ohio (2012), I can't think of a black person who went to a school with a loaded gun and committed mass murder. Those and literally dozens of other school shootups since 1970 occurred almost entirely in small towns where blacks can barely be found. (For a complete list, click here.) I can only think of two black serial killers: Wayne Williams in Atlanta and the D.C. sniper.
The difference is that when a white male commits serial murders or rapes, people don't start profiling all white males— they try to be specific. If whites looked at black people that way— as individuals— Trayvon Martin might still be alive today.♦
To read a related comment by Robert Zaller, click here.♦
To read a response, click here.
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