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Title: Trayvon Martin Author: Chris Hobson Date: 2013 Language: en Topics: Black Lives Matter, The Utopian Source: Retrieved on 7th August 2021 from http://utopianmag.com/archives/tag-The%20Utopian%20Vol.%2012%20-%202013/christopher-z-hobson-trayvon-martin-zimmerman-gettysburg-african-americans-americanism-malcolm-x/ Notes: Published in The Utopian Vol. 12.
It is very difficult to write about the outcome of the Trayvon Martin
case. What happened hurts more than anything in years. My most basic
thought is simply: that poor boy. And his parents—what they are going
through would be unimaginable, except for the long line of Black parents
and family before them who have suffered the same way: a son blown away
by the police, by vigilantes, by a mob, youths lined up by dealers and
executed on outdoor basketball courts, drive-by shootings, little
children killed by stray bullets. All this is horrible beyond words and
yet for one’s son’s killer to be indicted, tried, and then acquitted
adds insult and dishonor—a weighing of the precise importance of a Black
person’s life in the United States—to the pain of death. And so Trayvon
Martin’s parents had to use the stoicism of so many thousands before
them. It is all they have.
My sense is that Martin was as good as dead the moment Zimmerman spotted
him. It was only necessary for something to go wrong, and something
almost always does. The friend Martin spoke to by cellphone advised him
to run for his father’s fiancée’s house; he said, “I’ll walk faster.” He
was right—to run would have been to invite attack—but the decision
didn’t help him. We don’t know what happened next and we never will. It
is possible that stopping and meekly answering questions from an unknown
white man would have saved Martin’s life, and it is possible that it
wouldn’t have, or that Zimmerman gave him no chance to answer questions.
What happened later was more predictable. I myself expected an acquittal
from the moment Zimmerman was indicted. My reasons were: the sense that
the prosecution would never try the case seriously—that is, would never
make race the center of the case; the sense that unstated stereotypes of
Black male criminality would control the case; the sense that defense of
property (white property) is sacrosanct in the United States. I believe
the prosecution was embarrassed into bringing charges and never for a
moment understood the case from the viewpoint of Black people—that is,
as one of the thousands of killings of Blacks who were in “the wrong
place” over the last century, almost always with full exoneration of the
white perpetrators. I think the prosecution never understood the
prejudices mobilized by the case—that if a young Black male in a gated
community is not necessarily a criminal, it’s not unreasonable to think
he might be; that a “neighborhood watchman” is a purely conscientious
citizen without prejudices of his own. I think the prosecution never
expected a conviction and never seriously fought for one. Why was there
no Black prosecutor? Why didn’t the prosecution fight to get at least
one Black person on the jury, with the hope that, if necessary, that
person could hang the jury? Why didn’t the prosecution say the case was
all about race, all about the long history of official and vigilante
attacks against Black men—yelling it out to the jury, if need be, and
letting the judge disallow it, just so it got said? Without these
attempts, the jury could ignore race and yet vote the logic of race, at
the same time.
But what has happened is more fundamental than the specifics of this
case. It is 150 years and a few weeks since the battle of Gettysburg,
just under fifty years since King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, five years
into the Obama presidency, and this is—yes, this is—justice for Black
people in America. Make no mistake. In 2013, race is, as it always has
been, the issue above all other issues in U.S. life, as anti-Semitism
was the issue above all other issues under Hitler; because no other
group, not even Hispanics or Native Americans, has been deprived of
human rights as consistently and systematically as African Americans—not
now in the lofty precincts of constitutional law, but where it counts:
on the street, in the police station, in the ordinary criminal
courtroom, in the gated community, in the everyday discrimination that
continues without pause. Whether the United States can make room for
African Americans to live in real equality and with real freedom will
determine whether this society has a future worth the name.
For a very long time—since about half a century before the Civil War—the
great majority of African-descended people in the United States have
defined themselves, for better or worse, foolishly or wisely, as
Americans. They have insisted that they are entitled to the full rights
of citizens and that they mean to have them. Against this opinion of the
large majority, a minority have argued that so long as events like this
week’s can happen, the United States “can never be accepted as a civil,
much less a Christian country” (AME Bishop Henry M. Turner, 1883, on the
Supreme Court’s invalidation of the 1875 Civil Rights Act); that “I’m
not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the
victims of Americanism” (Malcolm X, 1964). The separatist minority
argued that the United States could never become more democratic and it
was necessary either to emigrate, to form a separate Black state or
nation, or, more recently, to form a spiritually, culturally, and
economically distinct Black presence within the United States. (Malcolm
X himself evolved in a different direction before his murder, favoring
some undefined model of world anticolonial and class revolution.) These
views deserve full consideration and respect. I personally, however,
don’t believe any of the separatist strategies is viable—most African
Americans are thoroughly intermeshed in the U.S. economy and share in
U.S. culture in distinctive African American form. But even more
important than these objective factors is the decision of Africans in
the United States to call themselves and to become Americans in the full
sense. This decision, as mentioned above, was made long ago and has
never come close to changing.
This means there is no alternative to the struggle for full rights and
freedom in the United States, and after messing around with this idea
for a long while (and after a long earlier sympathy with Black
nationalism, some of which shows above), I’ve decided to call this
position by its right name, integrationism. But integrationism does not
necessarily mean begging for inclusion, as it’s often understood by
leftists. Rather, the basic goal of African Americans for two hundred
years has been what I would call prophetic integrationism—working
ceaselessly for full rights and equality in a society that is pushed and
goaded to change to make these possible, and working to gain and hold as
many rights and as much leverage as possible in the meantime. Prophetic
integrationism means an integrationism that projects and works for a
future society in which what is impossible today becomes possible. This
is the integrationism of Francis Grimké, who in 1919 wrote, “The colored
man has no idea, not the remotest idea of accepting [present conditions]
as a finality”; of Reverdy Ransom, who in 1935 said African Americans’
goal should be to “level the walls of wealth and privilege, of bigotry
and pride, of color and race”; and of many others besides them. I think
this type of prophetic integrationism is the goal all of us should be
working for, in terms of the race issue in the United States. Beyond
this we are working for what James Baldwin, in the title of his 1962
novel, called Another Country. For Baldwin, Another Country referred to
the biblical New Jerusalem in a secular form—a new society of love that
Baldwin believed we could possibly achieve in the future. That is my
goal too. But I believe we also need the burning anger and contempt
people like Malcolm X and Henry M. Turner felt for the United States and
its virtually limitless violence and hypocrisy. Otherwise I think we can
be thrown off guard, we can fail to anticipate what I think most Black
Americans knew in their bones—the acquittal of Zimmerman was always the
most likely outcome. We need anger and rage to clarify our
understanding.
In the meantime the boulder we have been pushing up the mountain of
racial justice for so long has rolled back down—not to the foot of the
mountain, but some way down. The protests, prayer meetings, vigils,
demonstrations that have occurred round the country in the short time
since the Zimmerman verdict are, I hope, the start of something much
bigger that will wipe away the insult. It will, I hope, not take another
two hundred years to roll the stone back up the mountain, but we must
put our shoulders to the stone now. But I hope too that we can take time
just to mourn: that poor boy.