So here we go again, unnecessary violence! I wear my hoodie in solidarity with Mr. and Mrs. Martin b/c were I them, I would be inconsolable as a parent. In these moments there is no 'hierarchy of oppression' whether in Baghdad or Florida. These are all our children and we are leaving them a dreadful legacy of discrimination-as-usual. We are in the midst of that "dangerous course", one marked by the cultures of violence of our age. And beyond race, the Trayvon murder is, to me, a horror story about a man and a boy and the war on our children in every nation in the world. We seem to give them up to violence much too easily. Either it's sending them off to war to kill other people's children, ensnare them in human trafficking, or watch them kill one another as if each human life were expendable. Where is our sense of shame?
From an unlikely source-Charlotte Bronte-these thoughts are offered: " “Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow firm there, firm as weeds among stones.” Many Americans who are aware of the extent of racism in U.S. culture know that 'Trayvon Martin cases' recur on a daily basis in almost every state and throughout the world, to both young men and women. I remember my father having a strong aversion to the police b/c his was the era of the 1930's when lynching and Emmett Till's murder (1955) were fresh realities, even in Cambridge(MA), the city of his birth and where I was raised. Douglas Blackmon's conscience-crushing Pulitzer text Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to WWII(2009) described the illegal bondage of Black citizens about which my Dad knew from 'the grapevine'. Dad has passed away a few years before the Rodney King incident (1991) but it would have broken his peace-loving, boogie-woogie heart to have watched the infamous Holliday videotapes of excessive force by the LAPD. And James Byrd's 'lynching-by-dragging' murder (Texas 1998) would have sent him over the edge. I am skipping over the bad parts-all of the other unknown, young men of color (and other ethnics) whose mortality arrived too soon for them to grow into men. The murders of Vincent Chin and Matthew Shepherd, however, would have equally tested his faith in American society. Indeed, I was more than lucky to be raised by such a lover of humanity, one who regularly brought home strangers of every race to our family table for a meal.
Our work to eliminate prejudice is oil-rigg deeper, requires that we're man and woman enough to go to darker places within ourselves to redeem our country's destiny and our children's futures. No joke. The 'mutual understanding, amity, and sustained cooperation' required to eradicate race hatred and the war on our children is a lifetime commitment, not a media frenzy that activates our momentary shame.
What was absent from Zimmerman was this: freedom from fear...
