COLUMN: From the Left
The tragic shooting of a black teenager, Trayvon Martin, is a rapidly developing story that is quickly capturing the nation’s attention.
To briefly summarize, Trayvon Martin was visiting his father in a gated community in Sanford, Fla., near Orlando.
After stepping out to a local convenience store where he bought a drink and candy, he was shot by 28-year-old, self-appointed neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, who claims he was acting in self defense under Florida’s controversial “Stand Your Ground” law.
However, further investigation reveals that the murder was not merely accidental.
In the 911 tape, Zimmerman sees the young man and begins to follow him – clearly looking for a confrontation and prompting words of discouragement from the 911 operator. Moreover, Zimmerman can be heard whispering an expletive coupled with a racial epithet under his breath while he pursued the boy.
The subsequent handling of the incident compounds the outrage because the gross negligence on the part of the Sanford Police Department.
Rather than testing Zimmerman to find out if we was intoxicated or on drugs, they tested the dead body of Trayvon while at the same time neglecting to check Zimmerman for other evidence such as powder burns or even arrest him.
Furthermore, Trayvon’s parents were not notified for several days, despite the fact that Trayvon had a cell phone and they could have easily called the last number he dialed to find out his identity.
But sadly, the Trayvon case is not an aberration in the history of Sanford’s handling of the murder of black individuals.
In 2005, two security guards associated with the department walked free after killing an unarmed black man.
In 2010, the son of a Sanford police lieutenant who was caught on video assaulting a homeless black man also escaped prosecution. Similarly, George Zimmerman had a long history of reporting black men to the police and had consequently established quite a rapport with them.
Trayvon’s death and the Sanford Police Department’s actions are a sad demonstration of the real presence of greater societal and institutional racism in the U.S. – which we would rather pretend does not exist and sweep under the proverbial rug.
With the election of Barack Obama many thought we were living in a post-racial America.
But the plight of African Americans today, though improved since the Civil Rights Era, still leaves much to be desired.
For example, according to Human Rights Watch, African-American adults had an arrest rate 2.8 to 5.5 times higher than white adults every year from 1980 to 2007, despite both having similar rates of drug use and dealing.
Today there are more black males and females under correctional control – either in prison, jail or on parole – than there were slaves in 1850.
Coupled with the fact that in most states you cannot vote if you have a felony, a large proportion of blacks are lost in our democracy and consequently relegated to the status of second-class citizens.
It seems to me we still have a ways to go before achieving Dr. King’s dream for America.