Author: Jacob Surpin
In some sense, there is little more to be said about Trayvon Martin. As William Finnegan wrote in The New Yorker, “The killing of Trayvon Martin nearly went down the memory hole,” but the story certainly did not remain there for long, having been reported, agonized over and used to further the political agendas of both the right and the left for the better part of the last month. The tragedies that reach the national stage are almost always politicized-and they should be, especially when race is such an obvious driving force in the event. Yet the public narratives offered by both the left and the right on the case of the Martin killing are simply insufficient. As Melissa Harris-Perry states in her recent piece in The Nation: “It is easy but wrong to write off Zimmerman as a deranged man whose violence against Trayvon Martin was tragic but unpreventable.” That George Zimmerman killed an unarmed Trayvon Martin must be seen through the lens of the assumed criminality of African-American men that continues to pervade American society.
What did George Zimmerman see when he looked at Martin on the evening of Feb. 26? According to the 911 call he placed to the Sanford police, he saw “a real suspicious person,” who was likely “up to no good, or . . . on drugs or something.” He then informed the police that Martin was black, wearing a dark hoodie, likely in his late teens and had something in his hands, which would later be revealed to be nothing more than Skittles and a can of iced tea. Zimmerman left his car, did not respond to the policeman’s request that he stop following Martin and refused to designate where he would meet the police cars that had already been dispatched. He described Martin in language that was rife with racial profiling: “He’s coming to check me out. He’s got something in his hands.” As a black male, Trayvon Martin was always already presumed guilty-every one of Martin’s innocuous actions were interpreted by Zimmerman as something associated with criminal intent. Minutes later, following a confrontation likely started by Zimmerman, he shot and killed Martin with a nine-millimeter handgun and pleaded self-defense.
The conservative right has tried to shift the conversation to Martin’s supposed status as a troubled youth. The first indication of his character flaws, according to Fox News anchor Geraldo Rivera, was wrapped up in his hoodie. “If he didn’t have that hoodie on,” explained Rivera, “that nutty neighborhood watch guy wouldn’t have responded in that violent and aggressive way.” And perhaps more tellingly, much has been made of the fact that Martin was suspended from school for drug residue found in his backpack. The implication in these comments is that Martin was somehow responsible in the events that led to his death, that by performing blackness in public spaces and being a marijuana user, he should not have expected anything less.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, liberals have been quick to say that Martin’s supposed drug use has no relevance in the discussion of his death. While it would be nice if that were true, it is not. To begin to understand the significance of Trayvon Martin requires an understanding of how blackness, drug use and criminality are intertwined in America.
As a black man, Martin was linked to drugs in the public consciousness before he ever knew what marijuana was. The War on Drugs, declared by President Nixon in 1982, was and continues to be a public campaign that criminalizes African-Americans through images and discourse, and Martin was born into that inheritance. Recent scholarship-most notably “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” by Michelle Alexander-has pointed to the severely disproportionate incarceration of African-American males through the War on Drugs as the new manifestation of the systemic racism that fueled the old Jim Crow laws.
The statistics back this up: Alexander writes that the United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world (750 people per 100,000) and that in some states black men are incarcerated at rates twenty to fifty times greater than white men, even though some studies show that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color. More African-American men are in the American prison system – prison, jail, probation or parole – today than were enslaved in 1850.
While it is no longer legal to discriminate on the basis of race, it is standard to discriminate on the basis of criminal convictions. African-American males with criminal records are demonized and denied equal access to employment, housing and voting rights. Moreover, this discrimination does not stop with convicted criminals: in a vicious feedback loop, black bodies are always guilty of being black. Trayvon Martin was guilty of being black in Sanford. And even after his death, the hegemonic narrative of the new Jim Crow is being applied to his enduring image.
Jacob Surpin is a sophomore ECLS major. He can be reached at surpin@oxy.edu.
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