American justice: Racist on all counts

"THIS CASE has never been about race." That's what special prosecutor Angela Corey told reporters after the state of Florida lost its case against George Zimmerman, the man who murdered 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last year.

In the mainstream media, the same idea echoed through broadcasts and articles again and again in the days after a Florida jury issued its horrifying verdict of not guilty for the neighborhood watch vigilante who stalked an unarmed Black teenager, confronted him and shot him dead in the street.

The murderer's defense attorney, Mark O'Mara, had a sickening twist on this theme--that his client was the real victim of racism. "Things would have been different for George Zimmerman if he was Black, for this reason: He would never have been charged with a crime," O'Mara told reporters.

But to millions of African Americans--and to anyone who actually cares about justice--the murder of Trayvon Martin had everything to do with the racism that thrives in U.S. society.

THERE WAS the racism of George Zimmerman, who spotted Martin walking through a gated community in central Florida and decided he "looks like he's up to no good," as he told a 911 dispatcher. Translation: Martin looked like he was a young Black man in a place where a young Black man shouldn't be.

There was the racism of the local police, who didn't even try to notify the dead teen's family until after Martin's frantic father filed a missing person report--and who unquestioningly accepted Zimmerman's story that he killed Martin in self-defense, and had to be pressured by a national outcry into arresting the killer six weeks later.

There was the racism of the media, which amplified every slander against Martin. There are so many examples to choose from, but let's single out the vile Geraldo Rivera, who couldn't wait to pollute the airwaves last year with blame heaped on Martin for his own death. "I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin's death as George Zimmerman was," he told Fox & Friends.

Then came the trial. Zimmerman's defense attorney Don West began with a knock-knock joke, and the travesty escalated from there.

The jury itself--not a single African American among the six jurors or four alternatives--is a lesson in how the U.S. justice system avoids justice at all costs. The killing of Trayvon Martin was recognized by people around the country as an example of racial profiling, and it galvanized tens of thousands of people to demonstrate against racism in American society. That the jury in the Zimmerman's trial could exclude Blacks defies even the pathetic concept of Southern justice.

The almost all-white panel--there were two Latinos among the jurors and alternates--was the perfect audience for Zimmerman's lawyers, as they set out to prove that Martin was the aggressor that February evening. Problem: Zimmerman went out on "patrol" armed with a semi-automatic weapon, while Martin was unarmed. So defense attorney O'Mara lugged a piece of concrete into the courtroom and dropped it on the floor. "Trayvon Martin armed himself with concrete," he told jurors.

One of the defense's final witnesses was a young white mother, Olivia Bertalan, who said she had been robbed in the neighborhood just months before the killing. She described hiding in her closet with her baby as two African American males burglarized her home. The message: Of course you should assume that Black people are criminals coming to rob you.

When prosecutors called a witness who had talked to Martin on a cell phone in the moments leading up to his murder, his friend Rachel Jeantel, the defense attorneys ridiculed her--and then called her a racist after she related Martin's comment that he was being followed by a "creepy-ass cracker."

The narrow parameters set by the judge and tolerated by the prosecution made acquittal all but inevitable. By deliberately taking racism and racial profiling--the reason Zimmerman noticed Martin in the first place, the reason he followed Martin, initiating the confrontation--out of consideration, Martin's family was denied any chance at some measure of justice for the loss of their son.

And not only that--in a very real way, the verdict put a target on the back of young Black men.

Like Jordan Davis, a 17-year-old African American who was shot and killed at a gas station in Jacksonville, Fla., about eight months after Martin died. A white man, Michael Dunn, decided Davis was playing his music too loudly. Dunn plans to use Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law to plead his case--that is, he was threatened by the youth who was sitting inside an SUV at the time.

In other words, if you're Black in America, you're suspicious, you're dangerous, you're a criminal--and your life therefore is expendable.

THE FACTS easily show that racism was at the heart of the Trayvon Martin case from the beginning. Yet anyone who dared to use the r-word was warned that they were inciting violence at a time when everyone has to stay calm.

Barack Obama himself served up this message. "I know this case has elicited strong passions," Obama said. "And in the wake of the verdict, I know those passions may be running even higher. But we are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken. I now ask every American to respect the call for calm reflection from two parents who lost their young son."

Guardian columnist Gary Younge had exactly the right response:

Appeals for calm in the wake of such a verdict raise the question of what calm there can possibly be in a place where such a verdict is possible. Parents of Black boys are not likely to feel calm. Partners of Black men are not likely to feel calm. Children with Black fathers are not likely to feel calm. Those who now fear violent social disorder must ask themselves whose interests are served by a violent social order in which young Black men can be thus slain and discarded.

Obama's comment makes it clear that--at a moment when many of the people who voted for him looked to the first Black president for an expression of some kind of opposition, or at least sympathy for the Martins--it was more important to him to protect the status quo than question the obvious racist injustice that had taken place in Florida.

If Obama was right about one point, it's that this is a "nation of laws." Laws like "Stand Your Ground," stop-and-frisk, the death penalty, mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offense, and voter ID laws. This is a nation of laws that, by and large, discriminate against and criminalize Black America.

At the same time, there are some laws that this "nation of laws" doesn't think are worth enforcing--laws that address inequality in schools, in workplaces and in the voting booth. When a case challenging the Voting Rights Act of 1965--a central achievement of the civil rights movement--came before the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year, a majority of justices ignored the legacy of voter suppression in Southern states and shredded it. As a result, states where discriminatory voter ID bills failed just months ago because they couldn't meet a federal challenge are getting ready to try again.

This "nation of laws" should be treated with the respect that it deserves--the same amount of respect, in fact, with which it treats the vast majority of African Americans.

Absolutely none.

EVER SINCE Obama's election in 2008, it's been the fashionable opinion among the political and media elite that we live in a post-racial society. There may still be isolated incidents of discrimination and bigotry, goes the argument, but systematic and structural racism is a thing of the past.

Trayvon Martin's murder and George Zimmerman's acquittal for committing that murder have exposed this claim for the myth that it is. The seemingly unbelievable verdict in Florida becomes more believable when you recognize how racism is woven into the fabric of U.S. society.

As Tavis Smiley said of the Zimmerman verdict: "This is, for many Americans, another piece of evidence of the incontrovertible contempt that this nation often shows and displays for Black men."

By any measure--housing, education, poverty, jobs, health care, crime--this is a society that subjects African Americans to the worst conditions and the margins of society. And that inequality is propped up by a system of laws and police to enforce them--not to mention an ideology in which Black people are depicted as responsible for what has been inflicted on them.

These facts have become clear at every step in the Trayvon Martin case. And something else has become clear, too: that if there hadn't been protest, no one would have even heard Trayvon Martin's name. If it hadn't been for Martin's family speaking out after his death and for the outpouring of protest that followed, spreading from Florida to states in every corner of the U.S., Trayvon's murder would have been swept under the rug.

After the verdict last weekend, people took to the streets in cities everywhere--sometimes within hours. And there's more to come. Students from the Dream Defenders, a group started after Martin's killing, traveled to Tallahassee and protested at the Capitol and inside Gov. Rick Scott's office. Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network has called for vigils nationwide on July 20. The 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom will take place in late August, and the commemorations look certain to take on a new urgency with the Zimmerman verdict.

In 1955, Mamie Till, the mother of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old who was tortured and killed by racists for supposedly flirting with a white woman in Mississippi, looked back on her experience after Emmett's death:

Two months ago, I had a nice apartment in Chicago. I had a good job. I had a son. When something happened to the Negroes in the South, I said, "That's their business, not mine." Now I know how wrong I was. The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all!

It is our business to continue to demand justice for Trayvon Martin, and all the other Trayvons, past and present. We have to fight for a different world that abolishes discrimination and racist hate--one in which, as Mamie Till taught us, the rights and well-being and freedom of everyone is the business of us all.