The Chris Moeller Archives

Zimmerman, Dunn, and the deeply racist country that houses them

It is still not safe to possess black skin in the United States, a nation constructed upon the terrorism of Africans. This reality of racism runs deeper than just the presence of racist citizens, although we are certainly many. Worse, we are institutionally racist, a country possessing two separate and very unequal systems of justice.

We're not simply racist because George Zimmerman took off with a gun after an unarmed black kid that was busy minding his own business. We're racist because a police department looked at the facts of the shooting, and didn't think there was enough there to even charge Zimmerman with a crime. The federal government ultimately had to intervene for charges to be filed.

We're not simply racist because another terrified white man with a gun in 2012 shot at a car of unarmed black kids he saw them as "thugs" because they were playing their music too loud. (17-year-olds playing their music too loud! Holy shit!) We're racist because a Florida jury, against all rationality, failed to find the man guilty of murdering Jordan Davis. Michael Dunn was instead found guilty last week of only attempted murder and a gun charge. As Professor Angela Ards of Southern Methodist University summarized it, "The chilling social logic of this illogical legal verdict is that Dunn has been found guilty of missing the other black boys in the car, of failing to kill them all."

The greatest fear in White America is and has always been having to deal with a black man or black woman on equal terms.

The lives of black people here have little to no value. The system teaches us that. Jordan Davis becomes the "thug" Dunn perceived him to be when Dunn is given legal permission to murder him. The presence of Dunn's racial anxiety justifies his violent action. Young black men are most often the target of white racial anxiety, but black women may be lower still in the caste system, the most economically-disadvantaged, and educationally-disadvantaged set of citizens in the population. They are not immune to the violence their brothers face either. Nineteen-year-old Renisha McBride was shot in Dearborn Heights, Michigan three months ago after she was injured in a car accident and knocked on a neighbor's door for assistance. The home's owner, a 54-year-old white man named Theodore Paul Wafer, fired a shot gun blast through a screen door, hitting Renisha in the face.

The peaceful reaction of black men and women to this sort of systemic violence and to the recent verdicts by courts clearly ill-equipped to protect them, inspires me to no end. Their resolve and strength is certainly more than white institutional America is owed. Whether young black people turn to violent self-defense to protect themselves against a predatory state, or choose to adopt principals of nonviolence, we kill them just the same.

Yes, there is a crisis of violence in black communities as well as white. This is about divided justice. Zimmerman and Dunn are more than just a pair of high-profile examples of white-on-black crime, of white men killing black boys, they are instructive of our hypocrises and failings. The idea that a jury of his peers would have acquitted Zimmerman of shooting Trayvon Martin if the races of the perpetrator and victim were reversed is absolutely inconceivable. The idea that Dunn would have avoided a Murder One conviction if he was a black man shooting into a car of white boys, instead of the other way around, is laughable.

The law is colorblind, as written. That's a legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. But the realities of the system in practice-- the presence in fact of two wholly-separate systems, is and will continue to be another mountaintop altogether. Claims of colorblindness in the Zimmerman and Dunn courtrooms, and in their jury boxes, are denials of a deeply-stained national heritage. That Thomas Jefferson is still considered first and best for his writings regarding democratic principles, and not for the contemporaneous reality of his life as a slave-owning rapist, is white privilege at its very essence.

At the very core of who we are as a people, their lives are simply worth less. And nothing here will be right until that fact gets resolved.

posted by CM @ 8:09 PM