By Bayo Oluwasanmi
It has always been a matter of race. And it will always be. Race has defined America’s history
and will continue to shape its future. Whites and African Americans still lead separate lives, continually marked by tension and hostility.
The most arresting characteristic the Europeans noticed when they first came in contact with African was his color. Their description of Negroes started from his complexion then to his dress, and then his manners.
John Hawkins in 1564 during his voyage to the coast of Guinea and the Indies of Nova Hispania described Africans as “These people are all blacke, and are all called Negros, without any apparel, saving before their privities.”
In the color symbolism, white and black connotes different things. White means purity, virginity, virtue, beauty, beneficence, and God. The concept of blackness is its direct opposite of whiteness: filthiness, sin, baseness, ugliness, evil, and devil.
In 2013, blackness still means apology, harassment, profiling, torture, and of course death. There is pervasive racial inequality in America on family life, education, income, employment, crime and punishment.
Once again, White America was forced to confront its original sin – racism – with the recent acquittal of George Zimmerman by all white jury of their prejudice.
George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old mixed-race Hispanic neighborhood watch shot 17-year old unarmed, innocent African American Trayvon Martin on his way home on the night of February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida. He claimed he killed Martin in self defense in accordance with the Florida’s notorious racist “Stand Your Ground” Law.
In 2005, Governor Jeb Bush signed into law Florida Statute 776.013. It says a person “has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground if he or she thinks deadly force is necessary to prevent death, great bodily harm or commission of a forcible felony like robbery.”
“Stand your ground law works in the opposite direction. It was designed to serve as self defense shield to prevent and reduce violence. Instead, the law has escalated violence and unjustified murder of innocent people. It also serves as invitation for racists and monsters like Zimmerman to shoot first and ask questions later.
Investigations done by Tampa Bay Times staff writers Kris Hundley, Susan Taylor Martin, and Connie Humburg find that “seven years since it was passed, Florida’s “Stand your ground” law is being invoked with unexpected frequency in ways no one imagined, to free killers and violent attackers whose self-defense claims seem questionable at best.”
The Times staffers investigations further reveal that “Cases with similar facts show surprising – sometimes shocking – differences in outcomes. If you claim “stand your ground” as the reason you shot someone what happens to you can depend less on the merits of the case than on whom you are, whom you kill and where your case is decided.”
Among the findings of Times staffers are:
“Those who invoke “stand your ground to avoid prosecution have been extremely successful. Nearly 70 percent have gone free.”
“Defendants claiming “stand your ground” are more likely to prevail if the victim is black. Seventy-three percent of those who killed a black person faced no penalty compared to 59 percent of those who killed a white.”
Till date, many white Americans particularly political conservatives still harbor the prejudice that blacks are genetically inferior. It’s no wonder Zimmerman sees Trayvon as a nameless, faceless, hoodie with no worth or value but a disposable product that could be dispensed with at any time.
Listen to the conversation of pin head bigots on Fox/ Forged News on the Zimmerman verdict:
Bill O’Reilly: “There is no question at all that the American media is not reporting the black, white crime situation accurately.”
Bernie Goldberg: “They paint this picture of white people hunting black people. Here’s an inconvenient fact. Any time there is interracial crime, there is an overwhelming chance that the victim is going to be white and that the criminal is going to be black.”
Bill O’Reilly: “It is long past time to stop the madness and hold all Americans accountable for their actions. George Zimmerman was held accountable. The state of Florida prosecuted him to the fullest extent of the law but the evidence was not there to convict and most honest folks know that… But the judicial system worked the way it was designed to work.” Indeed, the judicial system worked the way it was designed to work – to favor whites!
“So, the anti-American folks are using the acquittal of George Zimmerman to vent their hatred. “American in general had nothing to do with the death of Trayvon Martin… Many of these Americans are nursing personal grievances. Others are victims of the victim mentality,” said O’Reilly.
The stats speak better on how mangled the American judicial system is and how impossible it is for a “blacke” to get justice. From 2002 to 2011, blacks and Hispanics made up 90% of those stopped. Further 88% of stops – 3.8 million people – were innocent.
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said “Black people are 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people despite comparable usage rates.”
February 14, the Wall Street Journal reported that Sentencing Commission found that “prison sentences of black men were nearly 20% longer than those of white men for similar crimes in recent years.
From 1980 to 2008, the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled – from roughly 500, 000 to 2.e3 million people. Today, the US is 5% of the world population and has 25% of world prisoners.
Take a hard look at the facts on Center in Juvenile and Criminal Justice report on racial disparities in incarceration:
- African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population.
- African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of the whites.
- Together, African Americans and Hispanics comprised 5% of all prisons in 2008, even though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately one quarter of the US population.
- Nationwide, African Americans represent 26% juvenile arrests, 44% of youth who are detained, 46% of the youth admitted to state prison.
- One in six black men had been incarcerated as of 2001. If the current trends continue, one in three black males born can expect to spend time in prison during his life time.
- 1 in 100 African American women are in prison.
The Sentencing Project on drug sentencing disparities reports that:
- About 14 million Whites and 2.6 million African Americans report using illicit drug.
- 5 times as many Whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of Whites.
- African Americans serve virtually as much time in prison for a drug offense (58.7 months) as Whites do for a violent offense (61.7 months).
- About $70 billion are spent on corrections yearly.
- Prisons and jails consume a growing portion of the nearly $200 billion the US spend annually on public safety.
With these gory stats details, how can a black man get justice in America? All his biological parts are feared, questioned and instant profile triggers – skin color, hair, nose, eyes, lips, hands, legs, speech/accent – for butchers like the Zimmermans of the world to snuff him
on the ground of standing his ground against a “savage” who doesn’t look like them.
Blacks must operate and navigate both the racial and social constructed realities of a “melting pot” that disproportionately judge blacks by the color of their skin rather than the contents of their character.
The era of Jim Crow and the dark days of KKK are progressively creeping back into the fore of American race relations. As a black man in 2013, you must produce identification to drive, walk, dress, talk, work, worship, and live assumed life that would conform to the guidelines of the whites.
If anyone still consumed by the blind assertion that race played no part in Zimmerman’s trial, Juror B-37 contradicted that assumption. Juror B-37 showed more sympathy and compassion for the murderer.
“I think he was frustrated with the whole situation in the neighborhood, with the break-ins and the robberies … I think just circumstances caused George to think he might be a robber, or trying to do something bad in the neighborhood because of all that had gone on previously,” said Juror B-37.
Writing in Policymic.com, Lauren Rankin aptly captures the prejudice of Juror B-37: “But the choice to use the defendant in a murder trial’s first name reflects a construction of George Zimmerman as the protector of white women and of white, civilized decency. Rhetorically, “George” is the hero. “Zimmerman” is the defendant in a murder trial.”
“I believe he (Trayvon) played a huge role in his death,” Juror B-37 said about the teenager. “He could have … When George confronted him, and he could have walked away and gone home,” Juror B-37 said. “He didn’t have to do whatever he did,” continued Juror B-37, “and come back and be in a fight,” she said.
Racism, prejudice, and discrimination – vestiges of slavery – still play dominant role in race relations in today’s America. Winthrop Jordan in his landmark work White Over Black in which he examines American attitudes toward the Negro 1550-1812, writes “If there was one thread of development which showed how deeply Americans felt about Negroes, it was a campaign which developed in 1790’s especially in Virginia for ridding the state (and the entire nation) of black men.”
Thomas Jefferson’s vision was to get rid of Negroes from America. When freed, the Negro was “to be removed beyond the reach of mixture” so that he would not stain the “blood of his master.” As Jordan further explains Jefferson’s vision, “there was no social room for inclusion of Negroes. Manifestly America’s destiny was white.”
Slavery operated on exclusionary principle and slaves as a laboring machine was completely separated from the white community. With the license for a white man to kill an unarmed and innocent Black teenager and for the murderer to walk away with slaps of high fives, means racial slavery is still alive and well in America the “freest” society in the world.
As for Black man’s position in the community, the association of skin color with crime and other heinous activities transformed a free black man into a walking contradiction in terms of social anomaly, “a third party in a system built for two.”
To the white community, black skin color provides an “evil example” and its presence imposed a question mark. The Trayvon Martin murder suggests the exclusion of Blacks in 2013 in a white community. It’s a tale of two nations: white and black, separate, hostile, unequal.