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| Rest in peace, Trayvon Martin |
A few years ago, I was walking home from work.
It was a warm night and a group of young black boys were crowding a narrow
sidewalk. I crossed to the other side, anticipating harassment -- I was not in
the mood for any "Yo, ma"s or "'Sup, Shorties" or "Smile"s
which I believed they would harangue me with. As I expected, one of the guys
called out to me, but what he said was completely unexpected.
"Miss, we weren't going to do anything to
you," he told me.
"I know," I said, seeing my little
brother in him at that moment.
My brother is a skinny kid (not really a kid
anymore) with a ready smile who loves to travel, hates reality shows, and is
entirely too loose with his life on social media as far as I'm concerned. But
in that instant with the boys on the street, I realized my brother and any of the black men in my life could be
pre-judged as a potential harasser or a threat just for standing outside with
their friends.
I started to think about what it would mean to
have people instinctively clutch their bags around you, tense up when elevator
doors close, or cross the street when you and your friends are just chilling
outside on a hot evening. And I started to understand, in a personal way, the many
ways black boys and men are criminalized every single day. I promised myself I
would never cross the street again.
It breaks my heart that 17-year-old Trayvon
Martin and so many other young black men are routinely pre-judged to death. I believe George Zimmerman's own pre-judgment of what and who is suspicious led him to kill unarmed Trayvon last February. It's also part of
what enabled the officers on the scene to accept Zimmerman's version of events,
let him go home without arrest, and ultimately what led a six-woman jury in the
resulting trial to acquit Zimmerman this past Saturday.
Listening to Juror B37 explain her mindset in
acquitting Zimmerman in the murder of an unarmed teen, and particularly
what she had to say about the way "they" talk and the way
"they" live in reference to Trayvon's friend Rachel Jeantel, whom she admitted feeling sorry for in her subsequent
interview with Anderson Cooper, spoke clearly to me of a pre-judgment she didn't even realize she was admitting to. As did her converse empathy with George Zimmerman.
The injustice meted in this case is even more depressing to me in light of recent
history and the distant past. So many black men and women have been the victims of racist pre-judgment.
But as Nelson Mandela turns 95 years old today,
I am reminded that that which seems impossible to change can in fact become a
thing of the past. The prejudices we all hold don’t have to outlive us. But things
don’t change by themselves. We’ve all got a lot of work to do, from patient conversations with people who don't agree with us on this issue to opting not to cross the street.
