Race in America

Jul 17, 2013 Editorial

Race still matters in the USA. That is what the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman and the latter’s subsequent complete exoneration by a jury showed quite clearly. As most commentators have pointed out, if it were not for the fact that Martin was black and Zimmerman was white, the incident would have remained a local tragedy and not become a national debate.
The bare facts are unfortunately unexceptional for America. A hooded seventeen-year-old Martin is returning home at night from a shop in a gated, mixed community in Florida and is followed by Zimmerman. Zimmerman is on the neighbourhood watch and is suspicious of Martin: a confrontation ensues and Zimmerman ends up with lacerations to his face while Martin is shot dead by him. Since Zimmerman is the only one who emerged from the encounter, we only have his version of what happened. He claims Martin attacked him with a rock in his hand and he was forced to defend himself with the gun he had on his person.
While Zimmerman did not use it, a great deal of controversy was generated subsequently by the “stand your ground” law in Florida. This states that if a person is attacked inside or outside his home, he does not have to flee or retreat but can use force to defend himself. The local police offered this ground as the reason why Zimmerman was not arrested for six weeks after the killing.
The reason for Zimmerman following Martin raised the crucial issue of “profiling” which almost every black, male, American has experienced at one time or another. The last publicised case was in 2009 when Henry Louis Gates Jr., the famous Harvard scholar of African-American history, was arrested at his home in Cambridge, Mass., by a white officer investigating a report of a burglary in progress. A black man fumbling with his lock in an upscale neighbourhood precipitated the report and subsequent arrest. President Obama, a friend of Gates, called the arrest “stupid”.
Not ironically, in a 1995 New Yorker magazine article, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man,” Professor Gates had lamented the profound distrust between African-Americans and the cops. But it had been thought that the election of a black man to the White House in 2008 signalled a shift in the way white Americans perceived blacks. More than half of the white votes had gone to Obama, after all. But a more significant statistic was that significant numbers of traditional democratic votes had gone to the Republicans. America still had a ways to go to reach the “post racial” society many asserted President Obama had ushered in.
Trayvon Martin’s case illustrates one of the most entrenched structural factors that influence racial interactions in America: housing. Even though schools, work and public places have become significantly desegregated since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, this has not been matched in housing. The old prejudices of “lowering the value” of the neighbourhood and its “tone” still lingers, especially in the southern states such as Florida.
Today over 70% of whites still live in predominantly white neighbourhoods and tensions sometimes resulting in violence are still roused when African Americans move in or even when they were part of the neighbourhood from the beginning. Such violence is historically so common that scholars have coined a term — “move-in violence”—to describe incidents of harassment directed at racial and ethnic minorities who have moved to or are in the process of moving to white neighbourhoods. One study showed that between 1990 and 2010, the vast majority of incidents seem to be concentrated in just eight states, with the largest number of incidents occurring in California (48) followed by Florida (40).
The Zimmerman shooting and its aftermath of nationwide protests in the US must be seen against this background. The Attorney General has called the shooting “unnecessary” and has opened up the case to determine whether there are any bases for a Federal prosecution. The structural conditions, however, will continue.

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Race in America

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