The Killing of #TrayvonMartin: A Tragedy?

by James Perkinson
*Special to R3

Light-skinned neighborhood-watch patroller sees dark-skinned teenager walking through his housing complex. Five minutes later, gun in hand, the former is standing over the dead body of the latter. How those five minutes between those two personas relate (or not) to the history of racial violence in this country is now a question of the relationship between all the rest of us in this country. The event is over. Trayvon Martin will not come back from the dead to tell his version of what happened. George Zimmerman has already told his. Here I do not want to spend time casting doubt on the narrative we have been given coming out of the recent trial, but take it at face value as a rough version of what may well have unfolded that night in order to ask some other kinds of questions.

The best way we can honor the sheer hell of Trayvon’s loss to his family and the work of grief they will now have to endure for a lifetime, as well as the nightmare of fear George Zimmerman faces for his future, is to seek to learn everything we can from the debacle. And debacle it is. It did not have to happen. To call it a “tragedy”—as the defense attorneys recurrently have—is perhaps an apt designation in the older Greek sense of the term. But it is far too simple given its typical use in our culture for events that we deem “regrettable, but largely without blame.” That the same defense team blatantly charged Martin with having, in effect, “killed himself” by his own behavior, did specify blame, and it is precisely the impossible contradiction between these two descriptions that needs to focus our attention.
The ancient Greek sense of tragedy applied to an art form, depicting stage characters whose every attempt to avoid their “fate,” unwittingly and irresistibly drew them deeper and deeper into the net of actions and reactions that would ultimately deliver them exactly into the experience they were trying to avoid. Typically such characters had that fate “revealed” to them beforehand by some kind of seer, or by means of a subtle hint or threat voiced by another actor, in the course of the unfolding action. The eerie lockstep march of the interacting decisions of the characters leading into the tragic outcome was largely perceptible to the audience alone, however. And thus it is that this debacle now addresses us at large in this country. It is as an emblem of interacting perceptions and decisions that is on-going in the present that the events from February 26, 2012 to July 14, 2013 now interrogate us. And the question is whether we will one more time relate to such a sequence merely as another cathartic “production” of the Great American Drama, with all the confirming emotional payoff it affords for those of us privileged merely to watch the unfolding events from our seats of comfort and safety. Or actually learn, and like a Brechtian participant, get up on stage ourselves and help change the direction of the action.

What is obvious from the “progress” of this particular play to date, is that the trial of George Zimmerman concluded an evaluation of the violence that took place on February 26, but only opened a much bigger trial of a “scene of violence” that is continuing to unfold on a daily basis in the country at large. The subject of that larger trial is race. Its “face” is being revealed in public one more time right now in the sharp disparity with which the Zimmerman verdict is being received in different communities. That some public commentators and a good bit of blog commentary exhibits something like “glee” at the acquittal is one side of that divided response. And this side typically denies that race had anything to do with either the killing itself or the trial outcome. The other side is the presence in the streets of crowds of protestors in virtually every city of any size across the country, and not a few urban centers elsewhere in the world. The chant on the concrete is invariably that race had everything to do with both event and outcome.

Race is a messy reality. Not all of those gleeful are white; not all of those upset are darker-toned. But it is patent that there is a profound difference of opinion on the role that skin-color has played in this matter, and a rough correlation between the sides of that argument and the hue of one’s appearance. It is also patent that racial difference continues to show up across our social landscape in virtually every indicator of relative well being or suffering—as is apparent from even the most cursory comparative glance at things like median household net worth, unemployment rates, educational achievement, incarceration relative to actual law-breaking, health outcomes, etc. The disparity between white and black levels of attainment is stark and in many cases growing.

How to explain that difference is the real subject of dispute about the continuing meaning of race. Like Trayvon Martin’s body lying pooled in blood on the ground of a largely white Sanford, Fla. housing complex, the social profile of black living conditions at the bottom of most of our scales of measurement demands accounting. The

basic possibilities are three-fold. The most difficult one to make apparent, but most crucial because of its overwhelming power and synergy, is the reality of various forms of opposing “social agency” (like employment discrimination, or fraudulent mortgage lending, or disparate rates of incarceration for similar levels of crime). The research on the levels of institutional discrimination and social opposition continuously and painfully navigated by African Americans is voluminous—far too massive to summarize here. For those who doubt such, I would invite a few hours engagement with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. But the evidence is staggering. Black aspiration faces what could only be characterized as a virtual tidal force of institutionalized opposition operating by way of racial stereotype and belief—often in a manner as maddeningly subtle as it is viciously irresistible.

The hard anvil of racial dialogue in this country is that such a complex of social opposition simply cannot be represented in a sound bite. And white “common sense” in this country has never been a blank slate. It has always been heavily trafficked in the history of racial stereotypes and images that serve as grist for popular imagination. Faced with the evident disparities of race, the easiest explanation to swallow is one or another form of “blaming the victim” (like the defense offered in relationship to Martin). The black community has done it to themselves. They inhabit a “culture of poverty”! If they would just stop complaining and get over it (and stop smoking blunts and get jobs)!

But the reality of black struggle is inevitably a complex synergy of both social constraint and personal choice exercised within that constraint. This is a complexity that the trope of “tragedy” does illuminate—but from only one side of the divide that race continues to articulate. Those of us who are light-skinned do not suffer disadvantage because of our skin color. That is not to say we don’t suffer, or that we don’t occasionally have the tables turned on us. But on average, when we who are white are forced to struggle in order to survive, it is not because people of color have institutional power over us. We indeed struggle, but for other reasons than being white. We struggle because of issues of class or gender or sexual orientation or disability. With respect to race, our chosen narrative has been “epic,” not tragic—a story of conquest, domination, control, and wealth accumulation—largely at the expense of people of color here and around the globe (taking land from Native Americans, coercing African labor to create wealth, invading militarily and imposing corporate priorities in order to extract raw materials or secure markets in the Global South, etc.). An epic narrative is one of self-determined “good” versus other-projected “evil,” unilaterally deploying the categories and norms of one’s own culture and social position to decipher and name what must be investigated as “threat,” and then acting with all due alacrity to dispatch what is evaluated as dangerous. It presumes the right and duty of exercising power over others. George Zimmerman, on Feb 26, acted epically. He was sure the housing terrain was his to defend, not a commons he was traversing, as was the case for the black kid he decided to “track.”

Martin, on the other hand, was caught in a tragedy not of his own making. He could and did act inside of its script. But he could not escape its lines of force. And this is where race enters the picture, ineluctably.

Quite apart from the presence or absence of personal animosity in Zimmerman’s heart, his very first response in this chain of events already began to enact a script much larger than his own psyche or even than the housing estate he so peremptorily set out to defend. The very decision to act already reproduced “race” without a word being spoken. His movement to exit his car and investigate, rather than staying put as the police asked, opened up that estate as a stage for a well-known play. His eyeball discerned “danger” as a vague shape of darkness that immediately also convened a challenge to his own male standing in the epic of America. Would he quail before the specter? Or stand up?
The impetus for the entire fateful episode hung in the balance on the question of suspicion. What did Zimmerman fear? And why? It is this galvanizing conjunction—a black male body and an anxious white “apprehension”—that remains the irreducible equation whose summation is so often black death and white consternation in this land of the free and home of the craven.

The research of recent years—particularly involving Implicit Association tests—makes clear that negative reactions toward certain features such as skin color is a learned response, not an innate part of our “natural” programming. Even just a momentary hesitance or uncertainty about communication or a flicker of caution, when face-to-face with one who looks different, is deeply informed by all of the norms and ideas, values and feelings that instantly attach to “appearance” (to face and gestures and clothing styles) that all of us are socialized into. Just as we do not individually create the verbal languages we speak (whether English or Spanish or Ebonics, or etc.), so we do not individually create the body languages we “channel.”

And meaning is not separate from value. We do not first say to ourselves, “Oh, look, a dark-skinned teenager in a hoodie carrying something in his hand; I wonder how I should feel about him?” The feeling response is part and parcel of the first moment of grasping what is in front of us. Evaluation is part of the first moment of perception. And the evaluation of race in this country is no exception.

Indeed, the evidence from more than a decade of Implicit Association testing is that some ninety percent of us who are white experience a “deep brain” response to the mere appearance of a black face. Our amygdala lights up, preparing the body for a flight or fight engagement. And other racialized groups such as Latinos or Asians react with nearly the same level of alarm. In fact, black people themselves react negatively to black faces almost fifty percent of the time—clear evidence that the phenomenon is not merely a matter of an in-group response to all others “outside.” It is learned. It is learned from the entirety of our social environment—family perceptions and history, dialogue and jokes with friends, educational and workplace experiences, what we see on TV and in the movies and via social media, and what we don’t see in our most intimate places of interaction.

We are bombarded with subtle and not-so-subtle messages about race virtually everywhere we turn in our lives. Getting up in the morning, stepping outside one’s house, going to a local coffee shop and only seeing people who look like us is itself already a racialized experience—typically an “unthought” one of ease and comfort. Alarm may intrude depending on some other cue in the environment—someone yelling at someone else, or staring coldly, or acting brusquely—but the trigger for the caution in that case is not skin color. And the “ease” we experience in not encountering someone different is itself part of the experience of race. It registers as instantaneous safety, a “void” or “lack” of the need to be concerned. It shows up precisely by not showing up. Our amygdala stays at rest and so we do not think “race.” But that is already profoundly part of race. It just means we think we are inside “our” race. But introduce a black face into our bathroom when we arise, or at our breakfast table, or outside our door . . .

What would Zimmerman have done had the body walking home that night been young, hooded, and white? We can’t know. Perhaps not even he knows. But it wasn’t white. And the long history of white civilian “policing” of black bodies moving through “white” space—on streets in the Jim Crow South, in parks, on beaches, in malls, etc.—is suddenly, one more time, at stake. It is not a healed wound. Profiling by actual police remains a major problem all over the country, not least in cosmopolitan New York. The litany of black males killed while being stopped and investigated is a liturgy of unceasing grief in the black community. The wailing has so far in our history, never ceased. And part of what is inexcusable in the white community is the typical lack of recognition and comprehension of precisely this continuity of pain. Given my own positioning in the structures of power that has conferred so much unearned benefit on my community and its infrastructure at the expense of so many communities of color, not knowing the history is culpable. I do not have the right not to know. Neither does George Zimmerman. That great subterranean river of anguish—made so murky and difficult to gauge by the complexity of all of its hundred-fold murky tributaries—is raging just below the surface of every encounter that black and white people experience in this country, no matter how strenuously denied or disavowed.

Enter “hunter” Zimmerman with all of his certainty of his right to challenge. And enter just as certainly, “fugitive” Martin with all of his as yet un-established manhood hanging in the balance. Does the latter run—and confirm the suspicion and possibly get a bullet in the back? Does he meekly comply and perhaps get assaulted sexually or otherwise—and at the very least have to nurse a deep self-loathing afterward for not standing up for himself? Does he stand up for himself? Certainly Zimmerman is standing up. Indeed, he has the law in his pocket right alongside the gun. He has the right—nay, as a man, as an American man, the duty!—to stand his ground. A law! And a moral, a cultural, a male, injunction! Armed with a gun. What did he think would happen?

The law must apply to both in this scripting of the quintessential American scene of race. (And it matters not one whit that Zimmerman is part Hispanic; in the eyes of Martin for that five minutes on a dark and rainy February night, he is irrecusably a “cracker.”) This is the old, old script of the nation: epic whiteness interdicting, one more time, “suspicious” blackness. For Martin, the all too visible lineaments of tragedy tighten inexorably into a noose. But there is a difference today. Today, the law applies to him as well as Zimmerman. He too has the right to stand his ground! In hindsight we could say that his great failing, legally, was that he did not pound Zimmerman’s head into the sidewalk hard enough! Would Fox News’ reaction, would Hannity’s, would the jury’s verdict . . . then have been the same, just in reverse? A black man, standing his ground against a white man, frightened of grave bodily harm—doing what he obviously had to do? I would be happy to take a bet from anyone!

But on second thought, what chance does a sidewalk have against a bullet?

What “Stand Your Ground” laws have done is licensed a cultural psychosis to shoot with impunity. Of course white men are terrified—way down deep—that black men might want to do damage to them. We are psychically set up to expect that what goes around comes around. The deep history of the country is that those of us white and male have long “flourished” as a kind of social necrosis on the black body, raping the women continuously during slavery, effectively emasculating males economically, politically, and socially ever since, through a thousand different strategies of discrimination and exploitation, in a great continuous operation of plunder. We have benefited hugely from the set-up even as it has hugely warped our own humanity. But there is a way forward. The American scene of race is indeed a tragedy. But not for the likes of Martin or all the other black men and women who have been made to perish early and often and brutally. For him and them it is not art at all: it is sheer calamity. And utter end. The American scene of race is a “tragedy” only for white people. It is a play—just like its Sophoclean predecessor was for Athenian audiences—whose payoff is catharsis. Race-as-tragedy does nothing but confirm all of the bit parts and major roles and plot logic for its ever-so “heart-rent” spectatorship, whose tears are but so much masquerade for a refusal to look in the mirror and change.

In the on-going encounter between armed white adults and skittles-carrying black youth, the burden for appropriate behavior must be on the adults. But in the trial of race thus far staged by our collective history, most of those of us who look like me have come nowhere near showing ourselves even as “grown up,” much less acquitting ourselves as “innocent” or “humane.” We have one more opportunity now before the bar of history to comport ourselves differently. The demand of the hour is that we do everything we can to repeal these laws politically, while committing to a lifetime of much deeper spiritual work. The ultimate aim must be calling out and healing this lethal cultural “illness” of white fear. Otherwise it will continue to rage like a demon, pass new laws and pull new triggers.

This trial continues. And the culprits in the dock are not a few problematic individuals. It is an entire culture.