I, like many of you, am following the Trayvon Martin and
George Zimmerman case closely, as demonstrative of race and crime in the United
States. Zimmerman’s verdict was announced yesterday, and there have been
protests today and more planned for the rest of the week. It has been a pretty horrible thing all around, and it was made surprisingly worse by this, where a Florida woman got a 20 prison sentence for firing 'warning shots' at her abusive husband, who had threatened her ('If I can't have you, no one will'). The judge decided that 'Stand Your Ground' didn't apply in that case, somehow.
I’ve read dozens of posts about the Zimmerman verdict on Facebook, some personal status posts and other published commentary that are
making the rounds. One of these personal posts named a racial element that I
believe is significant and rarely named – or quickly dismissed. One of these
personal reflections named George Zimmerman as “white” – referring to our
country’s sickness of black/white institutional racism. He is not white. He is
Hispanic. But the writer knew this and was making a separate point – George
Zimmerman is treated by the justice system that acquitted him and the pundits
and media that laud him as white. That acceptance into white-ness might have
influenced him to become the vigilante that murdered Trayvon Martin in his
predominantly white neighborhood.
I learned the history of racism in the US as primarily
whites being horribly cruel, then more subtly cruel, to blacks and sometimes
other groups of color. It was pretty straight forward, even if it didn’t always
make sense. The ‘why’ of racism was always obscure to me, even while its
effects were plain and horrifying. Having scratched the surface of race
studies, I think I have a broader sense of how racism works in the US.
The theory most salient here is about the instability of
whiteness. Historically (and this dynamic is not limited to race) marginalized
‘races’ like Irish immigrants, Polish Immigrants, German Immigrants, etc, have
vied for the cultural benefits of whiteness. At the time, citizenship was at
stake, as only ‘freed white persons’ could become citizens under the 1790
Naturalization law - and the Irish, Italians, Poles, Germans etc were not immediately welcomed as 'white.' The way these groups frequently gained access to whiteness
was by being favorably compared to those ‘less white’ then they. It was a
disgusting argument that linked skin color or facial structure (the ‘sciences’
of phrenology and eugenics) with moral behavior, and ultimately fitness for
self-governance (read: voting according to white interests). Irish immigrants
who had been compared to the ‘native savages’ for decades, attained whiteness
in part by selling out Native Americans in the 1850s. Eastern Senators (to the
chagrin of western Senators) argued that the ‘Chinese’ were morally superior to
the ‘blacks” in the 1880s. This has continued (more information in “Whiteness
of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race” by Matthew
Frye Jacobson).
Living in predominantly white neighborhood, the Hispanic
Zimmerman was not ‘white,’ but he was whiter than Martin, or the other young
blacks who had burglarized some of the homes in that area. It is part of the
sickness of racism that Zimmerman might have wanted to whiten himself by
hunting down blacks.
This in no way excuses Zimmerman - I think he is wholly guilty of an unnecessary and racially driven murder. I mean to say that our white supremacist culture might have played many factors in this situation. Thanks for reading.
