Monday, July 15, 2013

Trayvon, Zimmerman and Civil Rights Politics

Let me begin this post by saying that the decision to find George Zimmerman "not guilty" came as no surprise to me. While I did not fixate on the case as some did I did listen to some of the testimony and read up on the case. My first thought was what a terrible job the prosecution did, though I might add that the actual first reaction was what a terrible job in selecting the jury. Second (or third) was why the 2nd degree murder charge. It was going to be difficult to get a conviction without some serious eye-witness and the prosecution had none.

My sense is that if they had charged man slaughter from the beginning they could probably have been able to build a solid case and he would now be facing 30 years in jail. Coming in with the lesser charge at the last minute seemed to reflect to me--and I guess the jury--that the prosecution was desperate and unsure that it had proven its case. Finally, the defense had a game plan and executed it well, while the prosecution only wanted to make it a case about a guy who couldn't keep his story straight and was a "wannabe cop".

All that said, let me say that the case reflects a lot about the stage of American society today. Nowhere did I find an honest appraisal of the case. Fox had Trayvon the aggressor from the beginning, and MSNBC had Zimmerman as a pathological killer simply out looking to murder a black child. It quickly became a black vs white thing rather than the case of a man shooting a teenager in a gun-happy state. Did race play a part in the killing? Of course, so much of what happens in this country has to do in some form or another with race, but not all racial incidents are discrimination cases.

One thing that we can learn from this killing is that we need to make sure we know what fights to pick as civil rights cases. This was not a civil rights case even if it was a black teenager being killed by a "white hispanic" man. Not every confrontation between a person of color and a white person involves the violation of someone's civil rights. What was it that civil libertarians were fighting for: the right for a person to walk down the street without being followed by a neighborhood watch guy? Was it another fight against profiling? The fact is civil rights cases are about the individual and the government or the minority individual and the larger society not about two individuals.

The Trayvon/Zimmerman was about a white man killing a black man. Is that worse than a black man killing a black man as is happening by the hundreds in Chicago and Detroit? Or worse than a latino killing a Latino as it happens too frequently in the major urban areas in the Southwest? A racially-motivated killing--if that is what it was and we don't fully know--is not a civil rights case. Al Sharpton and other black leaders should have understood that. If it was a proven fact that neighborhood watch white guys are killing blacks or minorities indiscriminately across the country and no one is doing anything about it, then you have a case. If minorities are being jailed for using "stand your ground" and whites are not, then you have a case. Civil rights cases are about the systematic treatment of a large group of people and nowhere in the trial deliberations or even in the accompanying analysis was there any discussion that the Martin case involved any such situation.

One could argue that blacks are systematically being mistreated, but what would have been the "civil rights" outcome of a Zimmerman conviction? That black men have the right to walk a street in the rain eating Skittles and drinking Arizona drinks without being killed? They already have that right and 99 of 100 young black men do it every day--though Skittles and Arizona tea may not be their preferred snack--unless they are walking at night in large urban areas like Chicago. Where are the marches to stop that kind of killing? Why is it that killing a black person is only a big issue when he or she is killed by a white person? Is the life of black person only important if you connect it in some way to a white person?

The real civil rights question of today is why people of color have still not been empowered to change their own reality. While there are hundred of groups working at the local level to change attitudes and to empower people, too many national leaders are simply jumping on hot issues instead of doing the work that is necessary to change the status quo. We often forget that many of yesterday's civil/human rights leaders that we honor today were as much about empowering their people to change their lives as they were about changing the laws. They understood that if the laws were changed, things would still not change if people did not empower themselves.

In today's civil rights culture it is too much about what society can do for the person instead of how the person can take advantage of opportunities, or how they can fight against the obstacles still around. Civil rights struggles were never about solving every problem, only about eliminating those dejure ones that did not allow people to empower themselves. Give them the vote, desegregate the schools, end officially-sanctioned police brutality, teach then their history, and recognize them as human beings, etc. That was the goal. It was only partially achieved because the next phase was going to be the hardest, getting people to empower themselves by voting, going to school, taking bad cops to court, reading about their history and accepting themselves as full human beings. In many of our barrios and ghettoes that is still not happening enough.

There is still much to be done about poverty, discrimination, bad schooling, racial teachings, etc. And little of it had to do with this case. Trayvon was not a disadvantaged youth living in the heart of the ghetto with no chances for uplift. Convicting Zimmerman would have given closure to the family, might have called into question the idea of armed neighborhood watch guys, maybe created a groundswell against the gun culture in Florida or even punish a guy for doing the wrong thing, but it would not have done an iota of difference in the civil rights struggle.

The fact is that in the last study done that I know about, blacks were found to be killing whites at a much higher rate than the opposite. That isn't because black people hate whites or they are more violence-proned but rather the result of what most of us already know--poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, discrimination and what is causes: broken families, teenage mothers and fathers, unemployed, angry young men, etc. That is a real civil rights concern and it often gets lost everytime we have a case like this.