I know you've read plenty of opinions on the Trayvon Martin tragedy, but I'm offering this today because there's so much confusion and sloppy thinking out there about the role of race in the shooting and in Zimmerman's trial. I'm attempting to clear some of this up here.
We have a lot of people on the left claiming this is all about race, and a lot of people on the right claiming this has nothing to do with race at all. Both positions are typical, and both positions are stupid.
First, though the verdict in the Zimmerman trial is perhaps unsatisfying, it's a technically correct verdict. According to the law and the process, Zimmerman was rightly found not guilty. Where there's room to criticize this outcome, it's with the laws and the process themselves: perhaps we shouldn't have such broad legal interpretations of 'self-defense.' And even though Stand Your Ground wasn't invoked explicitly in this case, you better believe it was a card waiting to be played, a card that influenced the outcome of the trial and certainly both the prosecution and defense strategies. In fact, the defense's choice to waive the Stand Your Ground hearing at the beginning and fold those issues into the broader self-defense trial was itself a play on Stand Your Ground: it allowed the defense to keep Zimmerman off the stand.
We can criticize jury selection, police action at the scene, and other factors that allowed for Zimmerman, a cop, to get a very fair trial, a degree of fairness that, as Alex Pareene rightly points out, is not necessarily available to everyone in our society. This is the point at which the race question begins to come up; but it's important to understand that we don't even need to get to the race question, nor do we need to criticize the verdict itself, in order to question the law. The law allows room for Zimmerman's defense to argue that deadly force was justified because Trayvon's 'deadly weapon' was the concrete sidewalk. This effectively means that any time you get into a fistfight in Florida and someone goes down, so long as someone has a gun, they're legally justified in using it to shoot someone dead. To win a fistfight. In my view that's entirely moronic, and a society that wants to resolve fistfights with gun death is the epitome of insane. So for those who are claiming this is 'all about race,' it's not ALL about race. It's largely about the law. We could have a field day on the law alone before mentioning race.
Of course race and the law aren't extricable. Which is to say this can't ever be ALL about one or the other. It must necessarily be about both. In other, less publicized cases, race and the law are always at play together; we just choose not to notice. Either that, or it's just harder to tell that race is operating in white-on-white or black-on-black murder, albeit in different ways.
Next, for those who claim that this is NOT about race AT ALL, I'll explain why you, too, are wrong.
Race is a social construct (this phrase is repeated all the time, but most have no idea what that means). What this means is that race doesn't inherently describe who someone is, with depth or logic or accuracy; instead it's a category that we make up based on very rough and not particularly logical nor consistent impressions about how people look. Race is not the same as ethnicity, for example. This is why the term 'African-American' is used to describe black people, even if they don't come from Africa. This is why a 'white' person may be of Italian, Polish, Irish, or even Hispanic ethnicity.
There's been a lot of confusion about whether Zimmerman is 'white' or 'Hispanic.' He's both. White is a racial category and Hispanic is an ethnic category. This is why someone descended from Cuba via Africa from back in the 18th century when African slaves were transported to the Caribbean to work the sugar cane and tobacco fields would typically identify today on the US Census as Black Hispanic (black and Hispanic at the same time). This is why someone whose ethnic heritage is more closely tied with indigenous Latin America via Spanish imperialism would typically identify as White Hispanic (white and Hispanic at the same time). And of course someone who hails directly from Spain would typically identify as 'white,' like other Caucasian Europeans. Zimmerman is white Hispanic. We can dispute these categories or the very assignation of racial categories; but within the racial framework we have--mind you, a framework that is based on social construction--there's nothing wrong with labeling Zimmerman a white guy.
Of course, some will argue that it's reductive to call Zimmerman a white guy. Shouldn't we also acknowledge that he's Hispanic? I tend to agree; but then again, how often do we demand that a white Irish guy gets called 'white Irish,' a white Italian guy 'white Italian'? Why don't we demand that all 'whites' be identified with an ethnicity in addition to a racial category, like 'white European,' 'white Hispanic,' 'white Anglo-Saxon,' 'white Celtic,' etc.? Because each of these categories is every bit as white as Zimmerman; and Zimmerman is every bit as white as each of these categories.
I've argued for a long time now that the category of 'whiteness' is extremely problematic precisely because it gets imbued with a specifically gentrified white Anglo-Saxon culture to which the vast majority of white people don't belong or identify (including Zimmerman). To put it more simply, people like Mitt Romney are 'white,' while people like Marshal Mathers are 'acting black.' But why should people like Mitt Romney dominate the representation of whiteness? Why can't Eminem represent whiteness too? It's not that all us white people got together and voted on it. It's because whiteness, like blackness, is culturally loaded beyond its (weak) racially descriptive function. This loaded notion of whiteness is precisely why when we accurately call Zimmerman, an Hispanic guy, 'white,' people get confused and can't seem to accept it. Because 'white' and 'Hispanic' are culturally loaded, too; and the identity stereotypes they carry are often incompatible. For many on the left the idea of calling an Hispanic man 'white' comes too dangerously close to eliding the historically protected status of Hispanics as a minority in the US.
The wrench we throw into this, then, is this idea of historically protected status. Racial and ethnic identities aside, there are some components of identity in the US for which, because of historical (which is NOT to say not ongoing) discrimination, we have certain legal and cultural protections for protected groups. Consider, for example, that a white Jew could identify as both white and Jewish (a term with ethnic as well as religious connotations), and be protected as a consequence of historical anti-Semitism. As a white guy Zimmerman isn't protected as such; as an Hispanic he is. By calling Zimmerman white, we don't forfeit whatever protections are due him because he is also Hispanic. But too many people can't seem to see past this fact, and want to put him into one box or the other. In a way, I admit, this is not fair to whiteness, nor to Hispanics. When we persecute Hispanics as 'illegals,' stop and search them (like Zimmerman did Trayvon) without reasonable suspicion, and perpetuate any number of other harmful stereotypes, we prove that 'Hispanic' is and should remain a protected status. But this doesn't mean some whites--like, say, white Hispanics--aren't discriminated against.
To put it simply, we don't have to purge an individual of all his or her whiteness in order to admit that they can be discriminated against. To think this way is to be discriminatory against whiteness, placing it squarely in the evil category, the category of irredeemable status.
What matters much more than Zimmerman's race, however, is Trayvon's. Remember, Trayvon is the innocent dead kid. The innocent dead black kid. If it were Zimmerman in Trayvon's position, we might talk a bit further about whether Zimmerman's Hispanic ethnicity had anything to do with what happened to him. But since Zimmerman got the fairest of fair trials and the best legal defense to be expected--far better than virtually 99% of the rest of the US population--we don't need to question whether race played a role on his end. The real racial issue in this case is about a young black man dressed a certain way being unquestionably profiled as 'suspicious' despite doing nothing wrong. This profiling unquestionably led directly to his tragic death. This is principally where race is very relevant. Not because of the racial dynamic between the shooter and the shot--black cops shoot and beat innocent black kids too--but because of the racial import of Zimmerman's 'suspicion.' How many white kids in hoodies get stopped by police and shot for walking around at night? And just imagine how quickly white people would 'play the race card' and beat the 'reverse-racism' drum were a white kid to get gunned down by a black or brown cop with a demonstrated history of profiling whites?
And when the black community was understandably outraged at what happened, race perceptions again meant that the media had to warn us that we had to fear for 'riots' and disorderly and violent behavior. Like Trayvon, blacks who are justifiably angry about what happened are presumed guilty until proven innocent. So to say race isn't a part of this picture is naive at best, willfully ignorant at worst.
