Honouring Trayvon

It’s never a good thing when a unarmed child is killed in cold blood. Or warm blood. We don’t actually know what happened on the street where George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin.

We can guess, based on the evidence, that Zimmerman may have initiated the confrontation, or that Trayvon probably didn’t start the fight. After all, why would he?

And yet, an unprovoked attack is what Zimmerman says happened, and since he plead the fifth, he never had to re-affirm it under oath. There was no surveillance footage to contradict his account of events, nor sufficient evidence to prove he instigated anything. To follow someone when a 911 operator tells you that you don’t have to may be foolish, but in and of itself, it’s not provoking an attack.

All this, combined with Stand Your Ground laws, means that a verdict of Not Guilty was all but inevitable in this incredibly tragic case. Did George Zimmerman get away with murder? By the legal standards of most civilized regions, yes. But not by the legal standards of the state of Florida.

There’s been a lot a racially charged anger in response to the verdict, and I get it, but too much of it seems directed at the jurors, the defence attorneys, and the legal system, when, as near as I can tell, all three carried out their tasks exactly as they should have. I sympathize with the anger and encourage those motivated to stand up and try to change things for the better, but lynching George Zimmerman isn’t going to fix things. Here’s a few things that might:

• CCTV Cameras. Everywhere. It’s not that much worse than PRISM, right?
• Revise/Repeal Stand Your Ground legislation. It’s messed up that you can walk into a room alone with someone, murder them, then walk out saying that they snapped and tried to attack you, and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, get away with murder. But that’s the way things currently work.
• Gun Control. You want to sleep with a 9mm under your pillow? Okay, but maybe, if you’re out and about in an inhabited area, packing lethal force is asking for bad things to happen and should be prohibited. Carry a taser, tranquilizer guns, rock salt rounds… there’s a lot of options George Zimmerman could’ve used to neutralize Trayvon Martin without killing him.
• Fix The Culture. This is the biggest and most difficult item to address, which is a shame because I think it’s the most critical to solve if the goal is to stop needless deaths like Trayvon’s. I don’t think “That black man is a clear and present danger to me. I must kill him.” ran through Zimmerman’s head before he decided to follow Trayvon Martin that night. But I do think that if it was me walking home in a hoodie with a bag of Skittles that night, he wouldn’t have perceived me as a threat and he wouldn’t have done anything. There’s so many things in the media and culture we consume that contribute to these biases. When you see them, you’ve gotta call them out - that’s the only way they’ll stop. If you’re not sure how to do this effectively, the videos here and here have been hugely helpful to me.

All this isn’t to discount the systemic issues with how different races are treated by the justice system in the US - there’s a great many flaws there, and they should be worked on. But the justice system wasn’t the problem here. The problem is a society where George Zimmerman had access to the same power to kill as police, but without having to demonstrate any of a police officer’s training and discipline to exercise that power responsibly. The problem is a culture where young black men are more likely to be portrayed as a criminal threat than any other demographic, and which routinely cultivates fear to sell products and politics. The problem is self defence laws that give people a license to kill in the absence of eyewitnesses.

Trayvon shouldn’t die in vain. Focusing on the wrong problems, and making it easy for those perpetuating these problems (consciously or not) to deflect your critiques, raises the chances that he will.