Racism and the Trayvon Martin Shooting

The verdict is in.  We have all had time to mull it over.  The furor on both sides should be settling down.  That seems not to be happening, but it may just be that the need to fill airtime on the 24-hour cable news channels and space on all of the online news outlets means that this case won't be let go so easily.  And there is still the matter of the investigation by the Department of Justice into whether civil rights charges should be brought against George Zimmerman.

Last year, a couple of months after the shooting, I wrote about the law and the ethical considerations surrounding the use of lethal force in self defense.  Those who missed that can find it here [http://bobsolomon.blogspot.com/2012/04/stand-your-ground.html], and I won't go back over all that now.  If you didn't read it then, I suggest you do so now if you want to understand that part of the context of the incident, because the propriety of Florida law is once again being debated.

One thing that's important to understand about Florida self-defense law is that the "stand your ground" statute didn't figure into the criminal trial, because counsel for the defense did not bring it up but rather relied solely on traditional considerations in a self-defense case.  Was the defendant's decision to use lethal force based on a reasonable fear that he was in immediate peril of death or grievous bodily harm? The hurdle the prosecution had to clear to reach a guilty verdict was a high one.  Their answer to this question was no, and they had to prove that Zimmerman's actions were unreasonable beyond a reasonable doubt.  That's a daunting challenge, and their case was not strong enough to meet it.

The jury was not deciding any question having to do with race.  Their job was to place themselves in the moment - Zimmerman's moment - and decide whether any reasonable person in the same or similar circumstances might have had that same fear and acted accordingly, responding to the situation with lethal force. We know what they decided.

What about the Justice Department's investigation?  As I understand applicable law, they would have to conclude that Zimmerman's actions represented a hate crime - that is, his shooting of Trayvon Martin was motivated by race-based hatred of the young man.  I believe they will be unable to make such a case, and I believe that's because that isn't what happened.

Nevertheless, the Zimmerman-Martin case is most assuredly about race, and racism, and race relations in the United States.  It isn't difficult to see how, once one begins to trace the killing to its origins.

Why did Zimmerman see Martin as a suspicious figure who might be where he was for illegal purposes?  Because he was black.  Zimmerman, as a neighborhood watch volunteer, was participating in that watch because of neighborhood crime.  There had been a series of burglaries committed by young black men.  So a young black man walking down the street in that neighborhood naturally raised Zimmerman's suspicions.

There is a perception, based chiefly on statistics, that a disproportionate amount of crime - street crime, ordinary property crime, and violent crime - is committed by young black males.  Why are the statistics what they are?  The briefest economic analysis yields a straightforward answer.  Most ordinary property crime is economically motivated.  And thus the disproportionate involvement of young black males, who disproportionately belong to the urban underclass, with high and stubbornly persistent unemployment, directly follows.  Similarly, the urban drug culture is an alluring source of income to unemployed youth, and at the same time leads directly to gang violence.  The statistics are clear on that as well: most young black men who are killed on our city streets are killed by other young black men, and that is mostly in the context of drug-related gang violence.

So the interaction of Zimmerman and Martin was initiated by simple and straightforward profiling:  Martin fit the profile of those who had been engaged in crime in the neighborhood Zimmerman was patrolling.

This sort of profiling has been a hot topic of debate.  But one cannot escape its logic.  And that logic is based on crime statistics.  Those crime statistics exist because we have a large black urban underclass, and that, in turn, is largely a product of the history of race relations in this country.

Over five hundred years ago, white Europeans began transporting enslaved black Africans across the Atlantic ocean to the New World.  Traders included the Portugese, the Dutch, and the English.  The African slaves were used to work mines (especially gold) and plant and harvest crops (most notably sugar and cotton, as well as tobacco).  African slaves were brought to the English colonies as early as 400 years ago (first in Virginia).  In the earlier years of this trade, many enslaved Africans died during the voyage across the sea.  In the New World, many died at hard labor; it was cheaper to import new slaves than to keep the ones already here healthy.  It also did not, until much later, seem economically sensible to have them reproduce, because children of slaves consumed resources without performing any labor for more than a decade, and again it was thought more efficient simply to keep importing new ones.  For an excellent review of this ghastly subject in recent human history, I recommend the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Inhuman Bondage, by David Brion Davis, who has written numerous other books on slavery.

Our Founding Fathers incorporated the idea that "all men are created equal" into the Declaration of Independence in 1776.  But over a decade later, when they drafted the Constitution in 1787, they did not eliminate the great evil of slavery, instead including it in a compromise that allowed the importation of slaves to continue until 1808 and counted a slave as three fifths of a person for the purpose of enumerating the population and determining states' representation in the United States House of Representatives.  The issue of slavery in the new nation alternately simmered and boiled over the next seven decades.  Several further compromises were forged to maintain slavery in the South and govern the degree to which it was permitted to expand into newly settled territory.  Finally, when Abraham Lincoln, whose views in favor of abolition were well known, was elected in 1860, the southern states, led by South Carolina, seceded from the Union, plummeting the nation into a Civil War, fought both to preserve the Union and ultimately to put an end to slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1865).

For a decade after the Civil War, we went about the business of Reconstruction, but the cause of racial equality was lost.  The separation of the races was validated by the Supreme Court in 1896 (Plessy v. Ferguson), which pronounced that "separate but equal" public accommodations for blacks and whites were acceptable, ignoring the fact that the continued acceptance of separation of the races served to assure unequal treatment.  Not until 1954 (Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas) did the Court reverse itself and recognize that segregation stood in the way of equality.  In the 1960s we enacted civil rights legislation in an effort to correct entrenched unequal treatment in many spheres of American life.

Where are we yet another half century later?  The very existence of a black urban underclass answers that question in a most disheartening and emphatic way.  We cannot read statistics telling us there are more young black men in prison than in college without understanding that we have so very far to go.

I believe we will eventually overcome the legacy of two and a half centuries of African slavery in this land, followed by another century and a half of segregation and discrimination.  We should not prosecute George Zimmerman under federal civil rights statutes.  He did not kill Trayvon Martin because Martin was black. But most assuredly the two of them were face to face in what became a violent confrontation because Martin was black, and because that fact made Martin a target of suspicion for a volunteer in a neighborhood anti-crime initiative.

We must change the way our society works so that crime statistics do not paint a picture of the disproportionate involvement of young black men in property crime, and violent crime, and in drug-related gang violence.  At the same time we work to reform our society to change those statistics, so men like Zimmerman will not naturally suspect men like Martin of criminal purposes, we must also effect a change in the bitter statistics that tell us most young black men killed in this country are killed by other young black men engaged in criminal enterprises that have become a substitute for robust and lawful economic opportunity.