Voices: RIP Trayvon Martin, One Year Later

Since the killing, there has been a concerted effort by Zimmerman’s supporters to define him as Hispanic — as if this would change the case by removing the potential of racial profiling. This is a clever way of combining the “people of color can’t be racist” meme (an idea most whites usually reject) and the “one-drop rule” — a hold-over from slavery that says that having one drop of black blood meant you were a slave so that new slaves could be created even if they had a white parent. This rule has not historically been applied to other races and extending it to Zimmerman because his mother is Peruvian and his father German-American seems a strange stretch. And besides, race is a social construct, not a biological reality, so to evaluate whether he was racially profiling, we’d have to know what race Zimmerman considers himself. But even that question is moot once you realize that biases against people of color quite often reside inside people of color. Even if Zimmerman sees himself as Hispanic that doesn’t mean that he couldn’t view a strange black body in the distance through a racist lens.

If Zimmerman assumed criminal intent where there was none, assumed the presence of drugs and guns where there were none, assumed he was seeing a thug when we now know Trayvon was not, then he would have been applying racist assumptions to a kind of black Rorschach in the distance. He may be Hispanic, he may have had blacksin his family as has been asserted, and he may have mentored black kids as some have said. He may have even had black friends. But he may still have seen Trayvon in the distance and made a trio of racist assumptions about him. The test is not how he behaves toward every black person he encounters, or whether he is racist all the time. The test is how he behaved toward Trayvon and whether he viewed this black stranger as an armed, drugged criminal, as the 911 tape suggests, and treated him as such even though he was not.

- Touré, Time

Image via Daily Kos.com

Notwithstanding the protestations of his family and friends, who argue that Zimmerman has a multi-racial group of friends, Zimmerman appeared to live in a cultural bubble in which his understanding of the world was dangerously limited to those things most familiar to him. His “suspicion” of Trayvon mirrored the gaze that looks upon many blacks and Latinos with fear, distrust and expectancy of criminal behavior.

The hoodie that Trayvon wore on the night he was killed became an iconic symbol becuase it perfectly represented the criminalization of black men in America. Even in death, the young man who was gunned down after purchasing Skittles and iced tea was reduced to a weed-smoking thug who was delinquent in school.

We can’t begin to address gun violence prevention until we acknowledge that the criminalization of Trayvon was a mere extension of the racial profiling that millions of African American men face every day.

Considering the limiting depictions of black Americans in mass media, this shouldn’t be surprising. We can’t expect to have our minds saturated with destructive, violent images of a particular group of people day in and day out without that affecting how we view and operate in the world. This was why Trayvon’s murder reaffirmed my committment tomedia representations of communities of color

- Rahiel Tesfamariam, The Root DC Live

Page 2 of 3 | Previous page | Next page