It was a mild spring day in March
2000, when as a high school freshman
I decided to cut class for the
first time. No, I wasn’t skipping out to
avoid a test, or to meet up with a girl,
or to smoke weed in the park, as high
schoolers are wont to do. Instead,
riled by the burning energy of disbelief,
I left to march in a student-led
protest.
It was a spur of the moment decision. Four NYPD officers
had just been acquitted in the heinous murder of an
innocent and unarmed Guinean immigrant living in the
Soundview section of the Bronx. The man, Amadou Diallo,
was returning home from a long night of work as a taxi
driver when he was sprayed with 41 bullets. Apparently the
victim of a case of mistaken identity (or a salient example
of profiling), police unloaded on Diallo when, trying to
identify himself, he reached for his driver’s license. The
police claimed they thought he was a potentially armed
suspect in a rape case. As a precocious, but certainly naïve
teenager I saw this as an unfathomable atrocity. How could
anybody, especially individuals charged with protecting
society, be allowed to murder someone without any repercussions?
As I marched across the Brooklyn Bridge with hundreds of like-minded students, I became invigorated with a new faith in my generation. We were going to change things, not just in New York, but also across the country – no more excessive force, no more brutality, and no more profiling. We wanted to believe that our voices could put an end to incidents like the Rodney King beating, the torture of Abner Louima, or the murder of Randolph Evans.
Sadly, however, over 13 years have passed since that day and little
has changed. In fact, 12 days after the march
for Diallo, an undercover NYPD officer killed an unarmed
Haitian immigrant named Patrick Dorismond.
While some may deem these tragedies as coincidental or
random, one only needs to scratch the surface to see that
this is a systemic issue. We can recall the 2003 murder
of an unarmed and innocent arts trader named Ousmane
Zongo – shot four times, twice in the back by another
undercover NYPD officer. Or we can look more recently to
the police bullet barrage that took innocent and unarmed
Sean Bell’s life the day before his wedding. The one thing
tying these innocent victims together was their race. They
were all black.
But these incidents don’t only occur in the vacuum of New
York City. Oscar Grant – the focus of the new and excellent
film Fruitvale Station – was murdered by public transit
police in Oakland – shot in the back while handcuffed and
laying face down on the train platform.
And then, of course, there’s the ever-present case of
Trayvon Martin. Martin’s case has captivated the American
public due in large part to the national media attention
it has generated, and rightfully so. An innocent and
unarmed 17-year-old, Martin was gunned down by an
overzealous and overaggressive 28-year-old neighborhood
watchman named George Zimmerman. Citing Florida’s
Stand Your Ground statute, which allows individuals the
right to use reasonable force to defend themselves in their
home or vehicle, local police released Zimmerman after he
was questioned on the night of the murder. It wasn’t until
six weeks later that Zimmerman was charged with murder
thanks mainly to public backlash. Still, many believed
Zimmerman was unjustly charged and (according to the
jurors) because of Stand Your Ground, he was recently
acquitted of any wrongdoing.
Unlike the aforementioned cases, which received cursory
coverage from local media, Martin’s case has reminded the
public of the racial and political divide that exists in
this country. By now, we all know the details of this case. My point in writing about it is not to say who was right or wrong (although full disclosure, I think it’s a travesty that Zimmerman isn’t in a jail cell), instead it is important to call attention to two undeniable facts: Zimmerman assumed Martin was a criminal and the laws of his state gave him the option to kill Martin without repercussion.
During Zimmerman’s trial a recording of a conversation he had with a 911-dispatcher on the night of the murder was played. In it Zimmerman
stated the following, “We’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood, and there’s a real suspicious guy… This guy looks like
he is up to no good or he is on drugs or something.”
And the heart of this case lies in these statements. Zimmerman
assumed that a kid carrying Skittles and iced tea
was suspicious. Why because he was wearing a hooded
sweatshirt? Or because he was black?
This tragedy comes down to how we view each other.
Although he is of Hispanic descent, Zimmerman’s
assumptions represent a deep white anxiety inherent in
our society that seeks to demonize all black people and
men in particular. This anxiety isn’t based in any kind of
sane reality, but is instead the product of a systemic white
supremacy that has guided this country since its early
colonial days. By demonizing blacks and creating fear out
of nothing whites can ignore or justify the mistreatment of
blacks in America.
This type of logic could allow a person to say something
like, “Sure Trayvon wasn’t doing anything wrong, but why
did he have to attack Zimmerman. If he’d just kept walking
to his house, he would’ve been ok. It’s not Zimmerman’s
fault. He was just defending himself.”
As ridiculous as that sounds, it is the mindset of many
white individuals in this country who’ve been bred to
fear black people. On a systemic level, this fear allows our
government to continually oppress and destabilize blacks.
One only needs to recall the swiftness with which the FBI
eradicated the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr., and much of the Civil Rights Movement
during the 1960’s and ‘70’s (see COINTELPRO). Or we
can look to racially concocted drug laws, only recently
repealed, which stipulate a mandatory five-year sentence
for an individual caught with five grams of crack, while
five grams of cocaine garnered a slap on the wrist for firsttime
offenders.
On an individual level, this fear has innumerable consequences
from racist stereotyping to outright violence.
Consider that after the verdict in the Zimmerman case was
reported all major media outlets began to fan the flames
of fear-mongering by speculating that people – and black
people in particular – may begin to riot in the streets. Why
would that be the first assumption? It’s not as if this is the
first time something like this has happened. The media
has portrayed this case as some sort of anomaly, but that
couldn’t be further from the truth. A July 2012 report by
the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement found that in the
first six months of that year, “police and a much smaller
number of security guards and self-appointed vigilantes
murdered at least 120 black women and men.” That means
that one black person was killed every 36 hours by a cop or
vigilante.
As a high school teacher in the Soundview section of the
Bronx, I find that almost all of my students share a fear
and distrust of not only police, but also of white people in
general. And I don’t blame them. Nothing that has happened
in my lifetime could help to allay their fears. And
unless we as a society make a concerted effort to change
the racism and bigotry inherent in this country since its
birth, nothing in their lifetime will allay those fears either.
My students should not have to live in fear. They should
not have to worry about “looking suspicious” or wearing
hooded sweatshirts or being stop-and-frisked for no
reason. Black people should not have to feel anxious every
time they walk by police or through a white neighborhood,
but for the most part they do. And we shouldn’t
live in a country where since the “War on Drugs” began
blacks have been incarcerated at a rate six times higher
than South Africa did during apartheid. The fact that we
live in a country where a non-violent individual with a
drug problem can spend a majority of his/her life in prison
while another individual kills someone and gets off scotfree
is downright disgraceful.
In 1963, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement,
legendary singer Sam Cooke penned the song A Change
is Gonna Come. Rooted deep in the discrimination and
racism aimed at blacks during this period, Cooke’s song
came to exemplify the hope of the movement – hope that
soon things would change. With every case like Trayvon
Martin’s that hope dies. It’s time we stopped hoping and
began demanding. The situation we’re living in is untenable
and perhaps instead of hoping for change, we just
need to say “A change has gotta come.”