Trayvon Martin. (photo: unknown)
01 September 13
n
her new role as a neo-civil rights icon, or a modern black tragedy
icon, Sybrina Fulton moves lightly, but with a steely face. I met her a
few days ago, when I was moderating a panel that took place the night
before the celebration of the anniversary of the March on Washington. I
began by asking her how she was. She deflected the question both times I
asked, saying her feelings were not relevant, that the movement, the
effort to ensure that her son did not die in vain, were all that
mattered. However weary or sad she might be, it was unimportant. This
was a vocalization, I thought, of the stony face and the selflessness
that attends what may feel like an extended out-of-body experience for
her. My impression was that she is still in mourning, and still
adjusting to her role as an accidental part of history. She didn't ask
to be thrust onto the national stage.
That said, it's the remarkable way she and her husband
breathed new life into Trayvon's lifeless body by sending the networks
photos of their son on horseback and on skis, photos that showed he was
no thug, and by maintaining great dignity at rallies around the country
that made many think, if his mother is that regal in this moment of
agony, then her boy must be worth supporting. So she was complicit in becoming a symbol; it was a choice, albeit in a moment when she probably felt she had no choice.
But when Sybrina talks about her late son - not the
idea of him or the abstractions swirling around the memory of him, but
of the flesh-and-blood boy she raised - well, then the grim
determination melts away. That's when her face lights up as if there's a
bulb inside. I asked her who Trayvon was and she smiled as she said he
was a playful and childlike boy, still quick to kiss her and sit on her
lap. She said he was an innovator and that he wanted to become an
aviation mechanic. He is still a real person to her. For the rest of us,
Trayvon is a symbol. He is, for many, a symbol of the killability of
black men - how they can be murdered only to have the system shrug and
wonder aloud if they deserved to be killed. A reminder for many that we
are vulnerable, because young black men in particular are seen as
threatening. From a distance, George Zimmerman deduced that Trayvon was a
criminal with a gun who was on drugs; he told the 911 operator about
the trifecta of black male stereotypes. He is a symbol of how this
hyper-partisan nation can seize on the killing of a boy and turn it,
too, into a political football - a cause for the left, which saw itself
as protecting a racially profiled person of color, and a cause for the
right, which saw itself as protecting a person of color wrongly accused
of being racist who had used his Second Amendment rights to protect
himself from a black thug.
Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall once reminded
his fellow justices that there is no "war on drugs" exception in the
Bill of Rights. He said this because he saw them constructing one.
There's a slew of policing tactics and norms that exist outside of the
Constitution, or at least outside of the normal American expectation of
privacy, equal protection and freedom from illegal search, that exist in
order to police black men: Stop and frisk, the policy that
institutionalizes racial profiling; stand your ground, which deputizes
citizens and allows white people to feel comfortable using a gun
anywhere and anytime they feel threatened; mass incarceration, the way
the war on drugs warehouses millions for nonviolent health choices,
i.e., smoking marijuana, are but some. Whites and blacks use and sell
drugs at remarkably similar rates, yet blacks are over-policed,
over-prosecuted, over-convicted and over-sentenced, which helps police
departments and the prison industrial complex make money and helps
certain politicians get elected. It also perpetuates and burnishes the
image of black criminality as if that were the greatest threat to white
safety, thus feeding the mind of someone like, say, George Zimmerman,
who looked out of his car at a Rorschach - a black boy alone in the
distance - and saw not just a boy walking home but a criminal who did
not belong in the neighborhood and who was surely up to no good. Because
other blacks have committed crimes, then it was easy to assume that
this boy, too, was a criminal. Even though the prisons are filled with
black men, Zimmerman said, "They always get away." So he followed.
This fear of black bodies persists despite the fact
that the overwhelming majority of killing is intraracial. Year after
year, around 85 to 90 percent of people killed are killed by people of
their own race. Anti-racism educator Tim Wise points out
that white people are six times more likely to be murdered by a white
person than by a black person. The percentage of white Americans who
will be murdered by a black person in a given year is 2/10,000ths of 1
percent. But fear of a black man is much more effective political fuel.
It allows you to sell guns to protect yourself. It allows you to rail
against the welfare state - why should your hard-earned money be
redistributed to lazy criminals? It makes the war on drugs and tactics
like stop and frisk seem sensible. It makes voter suppression laws seem
righteous. It makes politicians who proclaim themselves tough on crime,
who promise to protect you from the Willie Hortons out there, seem fair.
Into this matrix walked Trayvon and George, into this
swirling fear of black bodies and the pride of the right to bear arms
and the apprehension of a stranger in the night. They stepped out of a
world of de facto segregation, a world where many of us don't know
people of other races. A recent Reuters poll
found that 40% of white people report no nonwhite friends and 25% of
blacks report no nonblack friends. This social segregation is most
pronounced, the poll finds, in the South. We have two Americas existing
side by side; Trayvon and George met at an intersection, and together
they stepped into history.
This is a history that can be scary for blacks because
it so often adds up to the message that our bodies are worth less and
that we have to manage the fear of black bodies that others feel. In my
childhood home, growing up, my parents taught me that when I was out in
the world it was my responsibility to mollify others, to let them know I
was no danger. I was told not to run when I didn't have to, to keep my
hands out of my pockets in stores, to be pliant if I was ever stopped by
the cops. No matter how much time has passed since then, these are the
same lessons I have to pass on to my son because they were vital to my
survival, and they'll be vital to his. Such is the double consciousness
that Dubois spoke of so long ago: We must hold two conflicting ideas in
mind at once - we must remember that we are powerful and full of
potential, and yet we must also know that others may not see us that
way. That's how my father learned to live after Emmett Till's killing
and how we continue to live after Trayvon Martin's killing.
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