I cannot believe the Zimmerman verdict. Except that I can. [View all]

[Plaid Adder]

I remember where I was on April 29, 1992 when I heard that the LA cops who were videotaped beating up Rodney King had been acquitted. I couldn't believe it. It seemed incredible to me that when there was actual ocular proof of a group of cops beating up an unarmed man, you could not get a conviction.

I soon noticed something interesting and, until I learned to integrate it into my worldview, painful. I was at the time living in a southern state and my social circle was about 50% white and 50% African-American. My white friends were shocked and outraged and could not believe it. My African-American friends were outraged; but they were neither shocked nor surprised.

The riots began and went on for days and my friends and I had a number of very tense conversations. I remember one of my African-American male friends talking about what it was like to walk down the street and see people start locking their car doors as you pass by. It was perhaps the first time in my life that I truly understood that there were basic things about this country that I, because I was white, did not understand. One of those things is how much fear is still mobilized against Black men. Another is that a Black man who has been beaten or--as the Amadu Diallo case later demonstrated--shot to death by the police generally does not, in this country, get justice, no matter how obvious or well-documented the evidence of police brutality might be.

That was 1992. It is now 2013. Twenty-one years later, this has gotten no better. No; it has gotten worse. Because now, in order to shoot an unarmed Black male and get away with it, you don't even have to be a cop.

That part of it, I have to say, is shocking. It is as surprising to me as the acquittal of the four police officers who beat Rodney King was back in 1992. But it shouldn't have been. We have all seen ample evidence of the power of the 'stand your ground' narrative in the post-Newtown conversations about gun control. All this verdict does, really, is reveal in an unusually stark way the racist anxieties, fantasies, and nightmares on which things like the "stand your ground" law are based.

With what I have lived through and what I have learned I ought not to be surprised. I ought to have known this would happen. I let myself believe that things like this could not happen any more. But they can. Just as the Texas legislature can pass a bill that effectively bans abortion in the biggest state in the nation. Just as the Supreme Court can strike down the Voting Rights Act. Progress is neither linear nor inevitable. The rights you win are yours only as long as you can fight off the people who still don't want you to have them.

Another thing that 1992 taught me is that no matter how much it hurts me to have my illusions about justice and the rule of law and the value of human life in this country destroyed, the news of this verdict does not and can never hurt me as hard or in as many ways as it will hurt African-Americans. My skin will always protect me from the worst this country can do, just as the life I have been privileged to lead inside this skin has protected me from knowing what that worst really is. To those of us who are not so protected, all I can say is that it makes me sick to think about what, if I had a son who was African-American, I would be telling him about what just happened. We try to teach our daughter, who like us is of mostly European descent, about justice and injustice and race and class and everything else and she does cognitively grasp these things. But we do not have to say: you will have to be careful now where you walk, because after this it is open season on people who look like us.

I hate this. I hate it all: the fetishization of the gun, the assumption that the sanctity of property outweighs the value of human life, the blatant fucking racism that is so heartbreakingly obvious not only in the crime but in the treatment of it everywhere from the police to the media, and most of all the way that blatant as that racism is people are still pretending it doesn't exist.

Normally I try to end a post on an up note; but at this moment, I've got nothing. This is a sad, sad, sad fucking day.

The Plaid Adder