The Face of Racism

The killing of Trayvon Martin has been on my mind all week. Monday I read the stories and listened to the 911 calls in shock and horror. How has his killer not yet been charged? How has such a thing happened? He was only a child in a hoodie wielding a bag of skittles, which has contributed to there being a national outcry over the incident. How many times has a similar thing happened to a grown man that we have not heard about?

The sad thing is, it is all too easy to understand. As many blog posts have explained, this is the cost of being a young black man in America today. Some people have questioned whether this is about race, perhaps because the killer was latino... but white people are not the only ones capable of racism. We as a people need to be aware that this is the face of racism in America today, both individually and on a systemic level: it is less often about outright discrimination and more often about subtle unconscious biases that are never examined.

George Zimmerman didn't think to himself, "I hate black people so I am going to kill this boy," though those crimes still happen; he saw a person he identified as suspicious, was angry that "These assholes always get away," and took it on himself to.... well, to commit violent murder! I am at my limit of trying to understand how people can do these things and convince themselves they were in the right; how people can blame the killing on a hoodie; how the police can "correct" a witness, take a killer at his word, and hold themselves blameless. I can no longer find it fascinating to try to understand their intentions. It is easy to understand. This is the face of racism, operating on a subconscious level, and we as a people need to grow up and deal with it.

What that requires is a lot of personal responsibility, even for those of us reading about this killing with disgust. We cannot respond by pointing the finger somewhere else: at the police; at those racists in Florida; at the culture of white privilege; at ignorance. We first have to look into ourselves and critically examine the attitudes that we have about groups of people different than us. We have to make a conscious effort to analyze our emotional reactions. We need to call out our friends and family when they make racially-charged remarks (or other stereotyping behavior).

In writing this I remembered Barack Obama's famous speech on race during his 2008 campaign and am listening to him now, as he talks about his own grandmother expressing racist attitudes and discusses the history of slavery. If we do not take Trayvon Martin's killing as an opportunity to learn more about ourselves and about the context of race in America then we have failed in our responsibility as human beings, as thinking and feeling creatures, as spiritual people, as rational individuals. We are the face of racism.