An Oppressor's Trial, an Intolerable Verdict
July 16, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The system has delivered its verdict in the case of the State of Florida v George Zimmerman. Outrage at this verdict has been expressed in many forms by tens of thousands of people across the country, most powerfully in the large demonstrations that filled the streets of cities coast to coast."Zimmerman was a predator, and Trayvon was his prey. And now it's open season on all of us."
Young Black man in Sanford Florida, July 13
The political battle to win Justice for Trayvon is far from over. But this verdict put a legal seal on ugly, murderous social relations of white supremacy—on the brutal oppression of Black people—enforced by the most vicious means. President Obama said on July 14 that "we are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken."
The verdict, and everything it represents, must be rejected and overcome. Yes, the system's courts and legal system have spoken, and Obama has expressed a call for acceptance.
But people have NOT accepted this verdict. Black people, and people of many nationalities, from all corners of the country, from many walks of life, have risen up in protest and expressed their anger in many other forms, from tweets to announcements at concerts.
We must not relent. At stake is whether a declaration that open season on Black youth will continue and deepen; whether any vigilante watchman who decides a youth looks "suspicious" can gun him down with impunity; or whether the Black youth of this society—in their millions—can not just survive but flourish, and be cherished. The real question was not "is it legitimate self-defense or not," but whether racist vigilantes like George Zimmerman will be given a green light to gun down youth like Trayvon Martin.
A Modern Lynching
For almost 100 years, lynching of Black people was routinely carried out in this country to maintain a vicious system of white domination. No justification was needed, any excuse was considered legitimate. Lynching was a bulwark enforcing a deeply entrenched system and culture of open and blatant white supremacy. Lynchers were rarely brought before a court. Even more rarely were they convicted.Now a Black youth is gunned down by a racist vigilante and is made out to be responsible for his own death. George Zimmerman's brother went on national news on CNN and echoed arguments made by defense lawyers in the courtroom, saying over and over that it was "Trayvon's fault," he shouldn't have been there, he shouldn't have defended himself. He said that what his brother did was completely legitimate.
The murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman was a modern-day lynching. The acquittal of Zimmerman expresses a legal legitimization of the oppression of Black people and white "entitlement" every bit as vicious and potentially genocidal as the Jim Crow of the not-so-long-ago past. These are the terms that have been set, this is the crossroads society is at.
"Stand Your Ground" Laws Promote Racist Murder
Let's
soberly assess what was upheld in the Sanford courtroom. Opening and
closing remarks by Zimmerman's lawyers claimed that Trayvon's "deadly
weapon," the sinister tool used in his alleged assault upon Zimmerman,
was the sidewalk! One of his lawyers pulled out a slab of cement and
dropped it on the floor in front of the jury. He sneered, "That's
cement. That is a sidewalk. And that (meaning Trayvon) is not an unarmed
teenager with nothing but Skittles trying to get home."
This
is not just a ridiculous courtroom stunt. Think of the implications of
this almost insanely malevolent claim. Any Black youth walking on a
sidewalk could be claimed to be "armed and dangerous" by this
standard—and living in a permanent open season—by racist vigilantes like
George Zimmerman!
So-called "self-defense" laws in Florida and beyond have been passed that basically encourage white racists to shoot Black people under any pretense and call it self-defense.
Of course, the wording of these laws doesn't overtly specify that these laws are specifically intended as a license for racists to kill Black people. But in a society so deeply stamped with white supremacy, that's the subtext. An example: In Jacksonville, Florida in 2010, a 32-year-old Black woman named Marissa Alexander fired warning shots that didn't hit anyone in an attempt to scare off an attack by an assailant against whom she had a court protective order. Unlike Zimmerman, she was arrested and charged with attempted murder. Marissa Alexander tried to invoke Florida's Stand Your Ground and self-defense statutes as her defense—she fired the shots to protect herself and her children—but she was convicted of attempted murder in 15 minutes by a jury and is currently serving a 20-year jail sentence.
When George Zimmerman saw Trayvon Martin, he acted based on the way he and others like him have been programmed by the system to act—he saw a "suspect," a "fucking punk," an "asshole" who "always gets away." George Zimmerman felt he had a license to kill Trayvon Martin, and he did just that.
In his dying moments, Trayvon Martin was treated as a "suspect" and less than human. Police tested his lifeless body for drugs while essentially giving his killer a pat on the back. Police who testified in court backed up Zimmerman's lies and helped him fabricate them when they interviewed him.
And, again reminiscent of the old-style lynching days, when Black people would search the river beds and other places where the bodies of lynching victims were often found, Trayvon Martin's father—whose home was Trayvon's destination that night—had to file a missing person's report to even learn his son was dead. The police and authorities had so little regard for the terrible loss of life that they didn't locate and inform Trayvon's father with whom he was staying until a missing person's report was filed.
Legitimizing Lynching
Can these abominations be allowed to continue? What does it say about a culture that spawns such hate filled racists as George Zimmerman? What does it say about a legal system that upholds the murder of a 17-year-old doing nothing but walking home? What does it say about political leaders and the system they represent when they say this must be "accepted"?A Trial Legitimizing Lynching
The whole way the trial of Trayvon Martin's killer
was conducted, from open to close, reflected, served, and enforced a
system that has as a foundational pillar the oppression of Black people.
The jury was not just overwhelmingly white, it was
skewed to people who already thought Trayvon Martin was guilty, and to
keep out potential jurors who might have a basic understanding of the
realities of the case. After the prosecution invoked their right to
remove a juror who said Trayvon Martin should not have been out that
late (shortly after 7!), the judge overruled their objection and put the
woman back on the jury. Meanwhile, a woman was kicked off the jury
because her pastor had spoken out for justice for Trayvon Martin.
The case against Zimmerman was short-circuited in
part because police made no serious effort to collect evidence of what
happened when they arrived on the scene. They did not collect and
preserve the evidence (for example, they shoved Trayvon's sweatshirt
into a plastic bag where it molded). They drug tested Trayvon Martin—the
victim, but not Zimmerman—the killer.
The defense—Zimmerman's lawyers—set the tone in
court with endless open appeals to racism—from their vicious attacks on
Rachel Jeantel to their constant depiction of Black people as criminals.
One particularly obscene moment was their display of Trayvon Martin's
shirtless torso—a scene out of "Birth of a Nation" intended to depict
young Black males as dehumanized aggressors. All to insist that Trayvon
Martin was the criminal for simply walking home with a snack and a
drink, and Zimmerman a hero for killing him.
And while the defense invoked and played on the
crudest racist stereotypes, the prosecution never challenged that, but
accepted those terms, promoted them, and in their own way pandered to
them. Between the judge's instructions and the prosecution's timidity,
institutionalized racial profiling was never exposed (nor was it even
explained what that is). The prosecution pandered to the whole logic of
the "war on crime" which is essentially a war on Black and Latino
people—including youth for whom the system has no jobs, no future but
jail, prison, or death on the streets.
Every part of this, from the police not charging
Zimmerman after he killed Trayvon to the verdict's announcement, is an
unacceptable outrage. The anger and pain felt by so many people is
completely justified, and will burn in our hearts forever. This is an
historic moment that concentrates so much of the daily, life-grinding
reality of this vicious system. A moment similar to the lynching of
Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955—where a young Black man can be killed
for whistling at a white woman, for being in the wrong place at the
wrong time, for not stepping off a sidewalk or calling a white man
"sir." Or, for nothing at all.
This is not just a ridiculous courtroom stunt. Think of the implications of this almost insanely malevolent claim. Any Black youth walking on a sidewalk could be claimed to be "armed and dangerous" by this standard—and living in a permanent open season—by racist vigilantes like George Zimmerman!
The basic plan of Zimmerman's defense was to put a Black youth on trial for his own murder. Mark O'Mara, Zimmerman's lead attorney, turned reality upside down when he made the outrageous, deceitful argument that if anyone had ill will or hatred on the night of February 26, 2012, it was Trayvon Martin. He said the "person responsible (for the encounter in Sanford that night) didn't go home when he had the chance."
This is not simply a case of O'Mara pandering to and helping unleash the most rabidly racist sections of U.S. society, though it is that, and the impact in social media and elsewhere was immediate and no doubt will reverberate and grow even uglier.
But even more, it is an argument by a well-connected attorney, in the most high-profile legal case in years, that an "open season" on Black youth should be upheld by the law. It is an argument for the legitimization of modern-day lynching.
The System at Work… The Way It Always Works
A young Black woman outside the Sanford courthouse expressed what she felt when she heard the verdict. "Anger. Sadness. Shock. Disbelief. One thing I didn't feel was surprise. This is how they've been doing us for a long time. Think about it. How many times have things like this happened to Black people?"Another woman added, "This is really gonna divide things more than they are. The country is divided, and this trial is gonna divide it more. How can anyone not understand how angry we are? This could have been anyone, it could have been one of our brothers, anyone."
Almost a year and a half ago, Zimmerman was charged with second degree murder. Pleas to "let the system work" and stop the protests began soon after Zimmerman was charged last year, and intensified as the trial drew to a close.
What the whole world saw was precisely how the system works. This is a social system that exploits and oppresses billions of people across the world, and has always had deep, brutal oppression of Black people embedded into its every fiber. The legal system that exists in this country—called "the best in the world" by is defenders—arises from and enforces that system of oppression.
"Justice is blind" is a common defense of this country's legal system. But many people think that the same laws are applied very differently to different people, and to different sections of people—and they are right. Laws like the Florida "self-defense" and "stand your ground" laws that were used by Zimmerman serve as an invitation to the Zimmermans of the world to attack Black people. And they are used very differently against Black people.
There are plenty of racist, hateful judges and lawyers in this country. But the problem goes much deeper than that. And the problem is not just that the law is being applied unevenly. The law is being applied the way it was meant to be applied, the only way it can be applied.
One difference between today and the days of the open, institutionalized and legalized discrimination and repression of the Jim Crow era is that today there is the appearance of equality before the law. Many of the legal barriers that enforced white supremacy have been removed, even in the South. (And yes, Sanford, Florida is the Deep South.)
But the same basic relations of oppression exist, and in many ways the real, actual inequalities imposed on the masses of Black people have deepened in the years since open Jim Crow ended and the New Jim Crow of mass criminalization and incarceration began to take shape.
Massive unemployment stalks the inner cities. The factories and businesses didn't leave because the youth had sagging pants. They left because the opportunity for investment and profit based on profound exploitation was greater elsewhere. And the cities are left to rot; housing crumbling and public housing getting shut down; schools closing, while the remaining open ones are underfunded and overcrowded; prowling police who consider every Black or Latino youth a "suspect."
These are basic realities of life for millions of youth in this society. Now, added to that, a court in the state of Florida, based on laws similar to self-defense laws in every other state, has ruled that these youth can be legally gunned down by racist killers.
The United States promotes its democracy and its legal system as models for the entire world. But at the same time, the U.S. holds millions of people in prisons, tortures tens of thousands of prisoners in solitary every day, has criminalized generations of youth, subjects hundreds of thousands of youth every year to the humiliation of stop-and-frisk in New York alone. Most of the people hit by all this are Black and Latino youth. All this is done legally and properly, and in accord with the U.S. Constitution.
For many people in this country, and throughout the world, some important questions of the legitimacy of the whole legal system have been challenged by the way the case of the State of Florida v George Zimmerman has unfolded.
Step back and look at a larger picture of how this murder came to happen, how it was so "easy" and "natural" for Zimmerman to profile Trayvon; how the social relations and the prevailing culture breed the kind of racist, vigilante attitudes that are used to "justify" actions like Zimmerman's, and how the legal system can justify it.
This country is filled with youth like Trayvon. And there also are many people like Zimmerman, people conditioned and trained by this system to hate and fear the Trayvons of the world....
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