There are times when history is more than one can bear, when events take over and one’s best judgment fails. It is best at such times, or so I have always believed, to cultivate what Keats called negative capability, “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” I’ve been thinking about the not guilty verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman. At first I thought I could accept the proposition that judge and jury did the best they could do, hedged in as they were by bad law, but after reading the published interview with juror B37, I find I cannot do that. Nor can I accept the corollary proposition that the jury “got it right” because the prosecution failed to prove Zimmerman guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
An unarmed boy, walking in a neighborhood where he had every right to walk, was stalked and murdered. His murderer, a vigilante who was advised by police to cease his stalking activity, was exonerated on the ground that in his confrontation with the boy he feared for his life. My purpose here isn’t to rehearse the arguments and counterarguments I have encountered over the last seventy two hours’ reading. These are easy enough to find and speak for themselves. Indeed, I’d be content to leave the whole matter to think about another day, except that my term of other days grows short, and I can no longer trust any culture of memory to help me with the time being. Most particularly I cannot trust the political culture I inhabit. Of course the Zimmerman verdict was racist. Of course the police took no interest in investigating the shooting or in identifying the victim. Of course Trayvon Martin was denied justice. Of course the misuse of Florida’s SYG law is an obscenity. Of course Trayvon Martin was virtually lynched in the courtroom, and of course the prosecution permitted this additional obscenity.
But most particularly I cannot accept the argument that I shouldn’t blame ‘the legal system’ for this terrible miscarriage of justice. A system that has allowed itself to be hijacked not only by bad law but by a blithely and casually racist human movement as well, in which George Zimmerman is merely one actor, deserves all the blame it gets from citizens whose interests it betrays, and these will be many if the Zimmerman trial becomes the basis of precedent. But this systemic failure is only one of a broad series of failures of our present system of courts to protect the rights and interests of citizens. Witness the Supreme Court’s recent decisions gutting the voting rights act and protecting drug companies from law suits, just two among a host of recent decisions in which the Supreme Court has abandoned humanity in favor of the human abstract. Witness the Supreme Court’s infamous 2005 decision in the Jessica Gonzales case, in which police were exonerated for failing to protect a woman who had obtained a restraining order against her abusive husband, which failure resulted in the husband’s killing the couple’s three children. Witness the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the fourth amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
The Supreme Court’s abysmal recent record with respect to the rights of individuals, together with its now well-established habit of pandering to the interests of corporations and the military industrial complex, has resulted in a system of legality that leaves a host of wrongs without remedy. One reason there has been no concerted political pushback against this very bad court is that the consequences of its derelictions have fallen primarily upon minorities, the handicapped, convicts and prisoners, and other politically marginalized groups to which the average suburban American prefers not to give much thought.
Except when threatened. My newspaper today presents the spectacle of the good citizens of Clayton, Missouri, a wealthy Saint Louis suburb, who are up in arms over the building of a low-income senior center in their midst. Just days ago we were treated to the outrage of parents from an affluent school district at the prospect of sharing their facilities with disadvantaged students from a failing district nearby. Today’s Washington Post carries an op ed piece by Richard Cohen that could serve as a summary of the fears and convictions of affluent Americans who do not believe themselves to be racists but who nonetheless choose to live in gated communities:
Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males? This does not mean that raw racism has disappeared, and some judgments are not the product of invidious stereotyping. It does mean, though, that the public knows young black males commit a disproportionate amount of crime. In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects — almost all of them young men. We know them from the nightly news.
Those statistics represent the justification for New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk program, which amounts to racial profiling writ large. After all, if young black males are your shooters, then it ought to be young black males whom the police stop and frisk. Still, common sense and common decency, not to mention the law, insist on other variables such as suspicious behavior. Even still, race is a factor, without a doubt. It would be senseless for the police to be stopping Danish tourists in Times Square just to make the statistics look good.
It’s easy enough to attack Cohen. Here’s a piece that does a pretty good job of that. But a perhaps unintended consequence of Cohen’s tirade is that it clearly places the history of Trayvon Martin’s death and subsequent character assassination in the context of class warfare. Race is an important element in today’s renewed class struggle—for many it will be the primary. But the struggle comprehends factors of gender and sexual orientation and issues affecting teachers, public employees, and other workers as well. We’re in the midst of a bitter class war, made worse by its perpetrators’ denial, driven by capital and privilege.
A final note: I do not think the reactions of the likes of Ann Coulter, Geraldo Rivera, or Thomas Sowell to the Zimmerman verdict are worth consideration. I have no wish to suppress the ideas of such people, but I do not believe that I am morally obligated to engage them. They have their audience, of which I am not a part. I find their ideas so morally repugnant that I cannot take them seriously.
There are times when history is more than one can bear, when events take over and one’s best judgment fails. I’m wondering if my body is up to a trip to the nation’s capital on August 28th. But right now I’m angry and sad. Angry and sad for Trayvon Martin whose short life has again been brutalized. Angry and sad for Trayvon’s family and friends, whose suffering has been enlarged and publicly ridiculed. Angry and sad for my country and what it has become, what we have become. For we could have been better, should have been better.