(sigh)
While there wasn’t really any chance I was going to sit this one out, as information has continued to spill out about this case, I find myself driven to the point of nearly ‘ranting’. I’ll do my best to just make it plain and stay on topic, but if I end up write/yelling in all caps by the end of this, you’ve been warned.
I’ll start with a story. Three teenage black boys dressed in black shirts and blue jeans are cruising the streets at 2 in the morning. An on duty policeman spots them, and proceeds to follow them for 20 minutes through every major and a few minor intersections in town. The car with the black youth wasn’t speeding, wasn’t running stop signs or red lights, but, just to be safe, the cop stays on them until they park.
When the boys park and the cop rolls down his window to ask where they were going and coming from, one of the boys, agitated but not reckless (a point I’ll come back to) yells out, ‘We’re home! Here in the scholarship dorm! We just left a meeting for our fraternity! Is that alright?’ Not my first or last dance with ‘looking suspicious’ but when the Trayvon story hit, I thought about my own ‘guilty by association’ episodes.
Any of us could die tomorrow in a car accident, or by having a heart attack, or any of the other ‘random’ events that end lives unnaturally. To be a black man, especially in America, means that on top of all of these things, we have to consciously and subconsciously be aware at all times that saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, or being in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time, or wearing the wrong clothes can get us killed. Not just beat up, not just ejected from a building. KILLED.
I bring this up because in the various responses I’ve read to the Trayvon case, I’ve heard disappointment, anger, resentment…but not a whole lot of disbelief. It’s because we know. Everybody knows. It may not be as celebrated as it was during the days of public lynchings and the height of the Klan, but everybody knows. There’s both a fear and a ‘less than’ quality that isn’t written into the laws anymore, but in a heritage that’s passed down from generation to generation. It’s why many of us bristle when we hear critiques of President Obama that have nothing to do with any of his political stances (the birth certificate fiasco). It’s why, in both positive and negative ways, black people get hypersensitive if they sense a black person is trying to ‘deny’ his blackness. It’s what got Trayvon Martin killed.
As I alluded to earlier, we as Black men learn very early on that our ‘mute’ buttons need to be a lot stronger than most peoples. But this is why the reaction to Trayvan’s death has been so strong: by all indications, this was as cold blooded as a murder could be. A murder of a child no less. My black male friends are actors, writers, architects, engineers, police officers, lawyers, everything under the sun. And we all know how easily that could be one of us. It’s not anything we signed up for, it’s just something we’re aware of and deal with. As men. Now that we’re all firmly in the father/uncle category, there’s an even worse dread among us. Trayvon could have been our son, our nephew. In many of our minds, he was our son and our nephew. And if he or any other black boy can be murdered with little to no repercussions, then none of our children are safe.
Rest In Peace Trayvon Martin. Your life was too short, but it was not lived without its own purpose.
