I
have not followed the Zimmerman-Martin case with much interest, as media spectacles
of these sorts generally bother me. But it has been impossible to ignore and
the not guilty verdict rendered by the all-female, sex member jury yesterday
certainly does give one pause. What, if anything, does it tell us about our
legal system? How does it relate to larger debates on race and gun control? How
does the case relate to masculinity? I will consider each of these in turn.
The
first point to be made regards the rather troubling Florida laws that allowed
for this decision in the first place. Florida has a very broad definition of
self-defense and allows for deadly force in response to imminent threat.
However, as with the Zimmerman case, it’s extremely hard to prove that someone
was in imminent threat. Zimmerman’s lawyers claimed as much, but it seems
telling that he wouldn’t take the stand in his own defense. The reality of the
case, as summed up well in an op ed in the Miami
Herald (Link),
is that a man with a loaded gun saw a black teenager he thought was suspicious,
called the police, was told not to pursue the teen, did so anyway, got into a
confrontation with said youth and then shot him dead. Even if the teen was in
fact threatening his life, which seems unlikely, none of this would have
happened if he simply let the teen take his skittles home with him. If legal
systems across the country adopted the stand your ground standard in Florida, I
feel the country would soon feel like the wild wild west, with racial, class
and even age profiling leading to even more senseless deaths than already occur
in the U.S. each year because of our lax gun control laws.
This
leads to the second point, about said gun control laws. Far too many innocent
people are dying every year because of the ready access to weapons. I have made
this point repeatedly on this blog and this is yet another example of the
danger that exist in providing access to hand guns much less “assault” weapons.
Given the power of the military and even police forces today, the old argument
that we must remain armed to fight back government tyranny is absolutely
absurd, coupled with the fact that largely peaceful revolts by people across
the Middle East have sprouted democracy from the ashes of dictatorship. Gun
control makes sense to everyone except the NRA, the corporate interests that
back them and conservative pundits who need ammunition to keep their audiences
angry and buying their ghost written books, redundant, hate-filled podcasts, rabble
rousing t-shirts, patriotic hats and other Fox-bling bullshit.
The
question of race is clearly at the heart of the matter. To put it simply, if we
reversed roles, it is hard to believe the discourse and media framing
surrounding the case would have been the same. Let’s just consider the
alternative scenario for a moment. There have been several robberies in a
working class black community over the past year and several men decide to start
a neighborhood watch. A white teenager buys some skittles at a local 711 and
decides to walk through said neighborhood on his way home. A black kid, who is
a little scrawny and has been mugged in the past, sees the white kid and thinks
he is suspicious. He approaches the white kid, who confronts him and a scuffle
ensues. In the scuffle, the black man, who is armed, shoots the white kid in
self-defense. Now, is there any chance that black man would get off? Would Fox
News dedicate most of its “news” programming to defending the black man for
months on end? Would people question the white teenagers background and
conclude that he presented an imminent threat to the black man? Enough said on
this point, I think.
Finally
is the question of masculinity, which has been largely ignored in this trial.
The emasculation of the American male has arguably been occurring for over a
century, often indirectly reflected in popular culture from superhero comic
books and films to Film Noir to Action Films and American Dream fare like Rocky
(is it an accident the Italian Stallion beats a black man named “Apollo Creed”
who is rich, successful, brash and wears an American flag during the fight?).
Since the conservative revolution of Reagan, and maybe even earlier (look for
example at King Kong, where a big ape is brought to America in chains on a boat
from a far off island, serves as a slave to American consumers, breaks free,
falls in love with a white woman and ultimately dies (“twas beauty that killed
the beast”)), the restoration of masculinity lost by the white working class
male in the 70s has been placed at the doorstep of affirmative action. Even as
the claims of reverse racism are often absurd, they continue to dominate the
conservative media landscape and political scene. Zimmerman was framed as a “soft”
man who had failed to realize his dreams of a military or law enforcement
career, a short, stocky guy who feared for his life against a young,
MMA-trained black man who seemed steeped in that lost masculinity. But is it
surprising that a young black male pursued by a Latino male on his way back
from the store would confront that man? Is a teenager really to blame for a
show of masculinity in the face of what appeared to be racial profiling? Are
the challenges to masculinity brought on by the success of feminism and
changing nature of what it means to be a man and a woman really the foundation
for justifiable homicide? These are questions that should have been a larger
part of the debate, rather than tired old racial stereotypes and notions of
justifiable use of guns.
In
the end, an unarmed black teenager was shot by a half-white, half-Latino man
with a gun, who had pursued that black teenager for no other reason than his
race. No one except George Zimmerman knows what happened that night, but do we
really want to live in a society where that is acceptable?
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