How do the Trayvon Martins of our country get murdered? And how do the George Zimmermans get away with it? Here’s a hint: it’s the same way mass incarceration of African Americans continues undisturbed.
A systemic racism teaches that people of color, particularly black people and particularly men, are dangerous. After all, aren’t they the ones always committing crimes? Getting arrested? Filling our prisons? Black men are a serious threat.
Never mind how many of those arrests and convictions are nonviolent and drug-related crimes. Never mind that drug crimes occur equally in white communities – only the arrests don’t.
An image is built of the dangerous, violent, criminally-minded black man – and it is so ingrained that people forget to question it. This is who people imagine fill our prisons, and when Zimmerman saw Trayvon Martin walking down the street, this is the guy he imagined he saw. And that’s considered reasonable – so much so that the defense, clearly successfully, played on racial stereotypes to turn the victim into the predator, and the predator into the victim.
In 2007 in New York, John White, a black man, was convicted for shooting a white teenager. He was provoked, but use of a gun was unnecessary and the jury still saw that. Zimmerman was unprovoked in pursuing Martin, but his use of a gun has somehow been deemed appropriate. A white teen can be drunk and belligerent and still (rightfully) not be assumed criminal, at fault in his own murder. Meanwhile, as Robin D.G. Kelley put it in the Huffington Post, “unless black people could magically produce some official documentation proving that they are not burglars, rapists, drug dealers, pimps or prostitutes, intruders, they are assumed to be ‘up to no good.’"
We’re living in an age that people like to say is “colorblind,” but accepting that statement is one of the most dangerous things we can do. The option to believe it is just one example of the white privilege that does still exist. As soon as we accept the idea that we are colorblind, we implicitly accept racial stereotypes and mass incarceration – the Trayvon Martin that Zimmerman imagined and what he did about it. The injustice goes beyond one law or one case, and it begins before Zimmerman pulled the trigger. It begins with the unquestioned idea of the dangerous black man and the system that sells it.
