Boy’s murder brings to fore America’s dicey race relations

              

US President Barack Obama wipes away a tear. PHOTO/ AFP PHOTO/Mandel NGAN 

By MARGARETTA wa Gacheru 

In Summary

• What mystified me is how that decision could have been left to a jury of practically all-White women. I apparently wasn’t the only one questioning the wisdom and justice of choosing a jury which seemed so flagrantly stacked in favour of Zimmerman.
• Much has been made of President Obama openly identifying with the dead boy and stating that “35 years ago, Trayvon could have been me”.
• Already, Black clergy in churches across the country are committing themselves to waging non-violent campaigns against racial profiling and the impunity associated with stand-your-ground laws.

Just as the OJ Simpson trial captured the attention of Kenyans who, nearly a decade ago, closely watched the way race relations played out in the American judicial system, many have been equally gripped by the ghoulish American story of a brown man whom Malcolm X would have described as a ‘house nigger’ in the America of 2013.

Armed with a gun and the honorary title of ‘neighbourhood watch’, the man in question shot and killed a teenage black boy whose only ‘crime’ was wearing a hoodie and walking through a gated community carrying a bag of crisps, bottle of ice tea and cell phone.

Trayvon Martin had been talking to his Haitian girlfriend when he felt someone following him. He expressed his concern to her just before some sort of scuffle broke out, followed by a gunshot which the girl heard. She was the last person to speak to Trayvon before he died. And one might imagine that her testimony in court would have sealed the fate of George Zimmerman, the volunteer cop who openly admitted to killing her friend.

Yet Zimmerman claimed in court that he felt ‘threatened’ by the black boy who supposedly attacked him. That he shot Trayvon ‘in self-defence’ seemed unbelievable to ‘people of colour’, especially to African-American men whose very existence was described over a century ago by the Black scholar W.E.B DuBois in his classic The Souls of Black Folk as “a problem to be dealt with, managed and controlled, but never solved.”

Zimmerman was charged with second degree murder, but a six-women jury made up of five Whites and one Puerto Rican voted unanimously for his acquittal. The only person of colour on the jury has since stated on national television that she believed “Zimmerman got away with murder”, but, in good conscience, claimed she had to obey the controversial stand-your-ground law which entitled Zimmerman to shoot Trayvon since, he claimed, he felt endangered by the unidentified black man.

The controversial law gives individuals the right to use reasonable force to defend themselves without any requirement to evade or retreat from a dangerous situation and has become the subject of debate in the US, with many saying police have been misusing it.

That verdict inflamed raw emotions all across America among people of colour and some liberal Whites, who are stunned that race relations in America are apparently still as backward and biased as they were when Dr Martin Luther King, Jr led the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

But while Blacks are protesting all across America, even holding a Million Hoodie March across the land and conducting sit-ins against what they see as the racist stand-your-ground law, the mainstream corporate media, especially the powerful Fox News station, mouthpiece for Rupert Murdoch and other Tea Party Republicans, have sought to vilify Trayvon and absolve Zimmerman of any hint of guilt.

The media, including CNN, even tried to raise doubts as to whether the killing of the 17-year-old boy had anything to do with race relations in America.

Wanting desperately to retain the unreal narrative that America has moved beyond the civil rights era and is now a post-racial society, the mainstream coverage of the Trayvon case sought to ignore the nationwide protests and the multiple voices insisting that this tragic case had ushered in a new era of civil rights protests, this time against racial profiling and stand-your-ground laws, the proliferation of guns and racist efforts to curtail minority voting rights.

For African-Americans and other people of colour, there was no question that race played a critical part not only in Trayvon’s death and the deaths of countless African-American men such as Rodney King, Emmett Till and Amadou Diallo; but also the jury’s selection and its verdict, which many cynical social critics claim was “inevitable” given Zimmerman’s role of ostensibly protecting the private property rights of wealthy elites from one “suspicious” black man walking in the wrong place at the wrong time.

What mystified me is how that decision could have been left to a jury of practically all-White women. I apparently wasn’t the only one questioning the wisdom and justice of choosing a jury which seemed so flagrantly stacked in favour of Zimmerman.

Emmett Till was an innocent teenage boy who is said to have had a slight lisp, which was interpreted by one Southern White woman shopkeeper as a suggestive whistle, and which she reported as the boy’s unsolicited sexual advance. Emmett was grabbed and brutally murdered without being given a moment to defend himself.

When his body was shipped back up North to his mother, she intentionally had an open casket at his funeral. His mangled body so shocked and appalled the Black community that the outrage served as the catalyst that is said to have activated the nationwide civil rights movement led by Dr King.

To ensure that Black rage elicited by the perceived injustice of the jury’s verdict does not re-activate the same sort of passionate activism witnessed in the 1960s, the American corporate media, including its supposedly liberal wing, CNN, sought to explain that the six women were picked according to laid-down legal procedures. There was no bias involved in the court’s selection of the six, claimed a commentator.

The fact that the Puerto Rican woman on the jury has finally come out and confessed she believed George Zimmerman was guilty of murdering Trayvon serves as some consolation for those who believe the same thing. And yet the Latina woman, known as Maddy, claims she had “no choice” but to obey the stand-your-ground law.

Her opinion has been strongly contested by African-American lawyers like Seema Iyer, a specialist in constitutional, criminal and civil rights law, who says if Maddy had held her ground, the verdict would have been a hung jury, and that would have been more accurate.

Nonetheless, another one of the six jurists also came out on national TV to claim Trayvon “got what he deserved” since he shouldn’t have been walking there in the first place. This is to say that racism still persists in the USA, no matter how hard the media spokesmen and women may argue that race had nothing to do with Trayvon’s death