Trayvon Martin.

 

Why do I care? Bad things happen to good people all of the time. Certainly it is tragic. Perhaps it is because, at least for many of the black males with the I AM TRAYVON MARTIN statuses, the fact that the events that occurred could have a happened to them. This a 17 year old who had potential for good and parents attempting to steer him in the right direction. The statistic that many black men don't make it to 25 is one that I joked around about at the National Black Law Students Association with my male colleagues. It was dark humor (no pun intended), but interesting nonetheless. The black boy gunned down motif is one that bothers me greatly, mostly because I often feared that it would be me. I worried about it in my own almost entirely black neighborhood growing up, and I was concerned about it when I went to other Queens neighborhoods where I was  the only black guy there. 

There's a huge racial angle to the story and it has very little to do with whether or not Zimmerman actually is racist. "I think he's on drugs or something" "He looks suspicious". The feeling is that if it were a 17 year old white kid that it would have gone differently. Again, there's a lot of imprinting. In my case, I'm reminded of store owners following me throughout stores, including in one case a time where a store clerk followed me outside of the store yelling and cursing accusing me of stealing from him, AFTER I HAD PAID. He thought that I paid for something small and then stolen something larger. Was that racial? When police entered a McDonald's approaching me with their guns "at the ready" (holster unsnapped, hand on the handle), and then asked me if I was supposed to be in class, essentially truancy, was that racial? Here in Colorado a lady looked at me and said "there's so many thugs here." Was that racial? In all of those cases the answer is maybe. Are they unjust? Certainly. If Zimmerman is truly not a racist, and would have committed the acts in question regardless of the race of the kid, does that make it better that an unarmed kid was shot? No.

There's also hoodie angle. This goes something along the lines of "Trayvon was wearing a hoodie therefore he must have been doing something wrong" or "Trayvon was wearing a hoodie so it is reasonable that Zimmerman thought that something was wrong". I understand that angle to an extent. I don't have a major issue with Zimmerman calling the police. Our feelings about what constitutes "suspicious" are often different. Honestly, if that had been the only thing that happened, this wouldn't be a national story. For Zimmerman to accost Trayvon after calling the authorities is where the problem comes in. Zimmerman shouldn't have done that. (the 911 operator also should have said "don't do that" as opposed to "we don't need you to do that", but that's another story).  The details after are almost irrelevant.

There's also the angle I look at it it from. The angle of police misconduct. It appears that at many levels the police blew this one. To me, what the police did, or didn't do is much more egregious than what Zimmerman did. The reason why is because we don't know all of the facts of what Zimmerman did and there's a time period that remains blurry. What we know entirely is what the police knew, and that in knowing what they knew at the time, should have arrested Zimmerman. The police should have arrested him at many occasions between then and when he was arrested last week. Also the 911 tap releasing his phone number was not a smart move on the part of the police. Of course, my bias here comes from my background in Criminal Justice, so I know academically what's supposed to happen. I also understand that the academic understanding often conflicts with the pragmatic applications in many areas. However, there's no excuse for the lack of an arrest here. If this was really self defense, then arrest him and let the jury decide. If not, let him go home knowing that what he did was valid within the law.

Will any result make race relations or police handling of cases any better? Probably not. Will any result bring back Trayvon? No. However, the fact that we're talking about race relations openly is a good thing something that I find to be promising. More importantly, the fact that justice s being served is meaningful