by Roxane Gay
Nothing is ever simple. The Zimmerman case was about race—and when a high-profile case is about race, tension is inevitable. Very little about the conversation surrounding this case was rational. Zimmerman claims he shot Martin in self-defense, but Martin was unarmed, carrying a pack of Skittles and a bottle of iced tea. What, precisely, was Zimmerman defending himself from? This is one of the many questions for which we will never have answers. Some people, though, are trying. Fox News pundits hypothesized that yes, indeed, candy and a bottle of iced tea could become murder weapons.
What we do know is that a young black man is all too often suspected of criminality. Frankly, all black men are all too often suspected of criminality. In his beautiful essay for the Sun, “Some Thoughts on Mercy,” Ross Gay writes,
Part of every black child’s education includes learning how to deal with the police so he or she won’t be locked up or hurt or even killed. Despite my advanced degrees and my light-brown skin, I’ve had police take me out of my vehicle, threaten to bring in the dogs, and summon another two or three cars. But I’ve never been thrown facedown in the street or physically brutalized by the cops, as some of my black friends have. I’ve never been taken away for a few hours or days on account of “mistaken identity.”
Throughout the essay Gay talks about how this education has shaped not only how he sees the world but also how he sees himself. No one is exempt. I don’t believe, much, in statements like, “We are Trayvon Martin,” but for black men, it is often true.
Zimmerman’s lawyers worked, throughout the trial, to demonize Martin, to make him into the scary black man we should all fear, to make it seem like George Zimmerman had no choice and did the right thing. That strategy worked because Zimmerman was acquitted. Those lawyers played on the idea that a black man—or, in the case of Martin, a black boy—is someone to be feared, someone who is dangerous.
In theory, justice should be simple. Justice should be blind. You are innocent until proven guilty. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney. You have the right to be judged by a jury of your peers. The principles on which our justice system was founded clearly outline how our judicial system should function.
Few things work in practice as well as they do in theory. Justice is anything but blind. All too often, the people who most need justice benefit the least. The statistics about who is incarcerated and how incarceration affects their future prospects are bleak.
I would like to believe in justice, but there are countless examples of how the justice system fails. In Georgia, Warren Hill, declared mentally retarded by four experts, was scheduled for execution on July 15, 2013. He was reprieved, though he remains on death row. Hill murdered his girlfriend, received a life sentence, and while in prison murdered another inmate, which led to the death sentence. Hill has committed a crime. He deserves to be punished. Will his death serve as justice for his victims?
Would justice in a courtroom, by way of a guilty verdict against George Zimmerman, really have been justice for the murder of Trayvon Martin? Would that measure of justice have comforted his parents and loved ones? “Justice” is, at times, a weak word. We would like to believe that justice is about balancing a crime with a punishment, but it is never an equal transaction. For most victims of crimes, justice is merely palliative.
It would be just as easy to demonize George Zimmerman as it is to demonize young black men like Trayvon Martin. I hate what Zimmerman did. I hate how his trial unfolded. I hate the way his lawyers treated Rachel Jeantel, the young woman with whom Martin was speaking on the phone just before he died and a key witness for the prosecution. Jeantel did not bother hiding her disdain for Zimmerman’s lawyer or the court proceedings, and he did not bother hiding his disdain for her. I hate what Zimmerman stands for and I hate that he was acquitted, but I also understand that he is a man who was raised in the same country as Paula Deen and he happened to have a gun. These things are connected.
Trayvon Martin is neither the first nor the last young black man who will be murdered because of the color of his skin. If there is such a thing as justice for a young man whose life was taken too soon, I hope justice comes from all of us learning from what happened. I hope we can rise to the occasion of greatness, where greatness is nothing more than trying to overcome our lesser selves by seeing a young man like Trayvon Martin for what he is: a young man, a boy without a cape, one who couldn’t even walk home from the store unharmed, let alone fly.
A Tale of Two Profiles
There is no way to truly know whom we need to protect ourselves from. Dangerous people rarely look the way we expect. We were reminded of this in early 2013 when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who looks like the “boy next door,” was identified as one of the two young men suspected in the terrorist bombings near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Three people were killed and nearly three hundred others injured. This notoriety, I imagine, explains why Tsarnaev was featured on the cover of the August 1, 2013, issue of Rolling Stone.
The magazine was accused of exploiting tragedy, glorifying terrorism, and trying to make a martyr or a rock star out of Tsarnaev. But protests aside, the cover is provocative and pointed. It is a stark reminder that we can never truly know where danger lurks. It is also a reminder that we have certain cultural notions about who looks dangerous and who does not. These notions are amply reinforced by the article accompanying the cover, something few people seem to be talking about. The tone of Janet Reitman’s reportage and the ongoing conversation about Tsarnaev as a “normal American teenager” are an interesting and troubling contrast to the way we talk about, say, Trayvon Martin, also a “normal American teenager,” but not a criminal or terrorist. George Zimmerman killed Martin because Martin fit our cultural idea of what danger looks like. Zimmerman was acquitted for the very same reason.
Most striking in Reitman’s extensive and well-reported article is how the people who knew Tsarnaev are still willing to see the man behind the monster. Tsarnaev is described by those who knew him in near reverential terms as “sweet” and “superchill” and “smooth as fuck” and “a golden person, really just a genuine good guy.” While Tsarnaev’s community acknowledges the terrible things the young man has done and mourn the tragedy of the bombings, they are unwilling to turn their backs on him.
The article also reveals how shocked Tsarnaev’s friends and neighbors were to learn he and his brother were responsible for such a crime. They were shocked because we have a portrait, in our minds, of what danger and terror look like and it’s not this golden boy on the cover of Rolling Stone. Time and again, the word “normal” comes up. He is described as “a beautiful, tousle-haired boy with a gentle demeanor, soulful brown eyes.” He enjoyed what most teenagers seem to enjoy—popular television shows, sports, music, girls. He smoked “a copious amount of weed.” He committed a monstrous act, but he retains his normalcy.
Reitman’s article is breathless in its empathy for Tsarnaev. Not only does Reitman meticulously reveal how Tsarnaev went from boy next door to terrorist, she seems desperate to understand why. She is not alone in this. When danger has an unexpected face, we demand answers. Family friend Anna Nikeava discussed the Tsarnaev family’s problems and concluded, “Poor Jahar was the silent survivor of all that dysfunction.” Poor, poor Jahar. Reitman later notes that “though it seems as if Jahar had found a mission, his embrace of Islam also may have been driven by something more basic: a need to belong.” The article seems ultimately to be asking, how can we not have some measure of empathy for a young man with so simple a desire to belong?
The empathy does not end with the reportage. There is also testimony from Wick Sloane, a community college professor who has taught many young immigrants like Tsarnaev. He says,
All of these kids are grateful to be in the United States. But it’s the usual thing: Is this the land of opportunity or isn’t it? When I look at what they’ve been through, and how they are screwed by federal policies from the moment they turn around, I don’t un
derstand why all of them aren’t angrier. I’m actually kind of surprised it’s taken so long for one of these kids to set off a bomb.
And there are even more of Tsarnaev’s friends, who are still stunned. Friends from college who found a backpack with emptied fireworks fretted about what to do because “no one wanted Jahar to get in trouble.” Even after all he has done, after all we know, Tsarnaev benefits from so much doubt from his friends, his community, and those who seek to understand him and the terrible things he has done.
This, it would seem, is yet another example of white privilege—to retain humanity in the face of inhumanity. For criminals who defy our understanding of danger, the cultural threshold for forgiveness is incredibly low.
When Trayvon Martin was murdered, certain people worked overtime to uncover his failings, even though he was the victim of the crime. Before his death, Martin had recently been suspended from school because drug residue was found in his backpack. There were other such infractions. This became evidence. He was a normal teenager but he was also a black teenager, so he was put on trial and he was indicted. With Tsarnaev, people continue to look for the good. The bounds of compassion for the “tousle-haired” young man know few limits. Trayvon Martin, meanwhile, should have walked home without “looking suspicious.” He should have meekly submitted himself to Zimmerman’s intentions instead of whatever took place on the fateful night of his murder. He should have been above reproach. As Syreeta McFadden noted, “Only in America can a dead black boy go on trial for his own murder.”
Reitman’s article is a solid piece of journalism. It reveals complex truths about the life of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Imagine, though, if Rolling Stone had dedicated more than eleven thousand words and the cover to Trayvon Martin to reveal the complex truth of his life and what he was like in the years and months and hours before his death. How did he deal with the burden of being the face of danger from the moment he was born? This is a question fewer people seem to be asking.
The way we see danger is, in large part, about racial profiling, a law enforcement practice that has been hotly debated for years because it implicitly connects race to criminality. Racial profiling is what emboldened an armed George Zimmerman to follow an unarmed young black man walking home, even after police told Zimmerman not to pursue Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman saw a young black man and believed he was looking into the face of danger. He hunted that danger down.
The New York City Police Department’s “stop and frisk” program allows police to stop, question, and search anyone who raises a “reasonable” suspicion of danger or criminality. The majority of people who are stopped and frisked in New York are black or Latino because these demographics fit our cultural profile of danger. These are the supposed barbarians at the gate, not the boy with the “soulful brown eyes.”
Though there are many objections to the “stop and frisk” program and other forms of racial profiling, these practices persist. Former mayor Michael Bloomberg defiantly supported the program. On his radio program he said, “They just keep saying, ‘Oh, it’s a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group.’ That may be, but it’s not a disproportionate percentage of those whom witnesses and victims describe as committing the murder. In that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.”
In her book The Color of Crime, Katheryn Russell-Brown says, “Blacks are the repository for the American fear of crime,” and also notes that
for most of us, television’s overpowering images of Black deviance—its regularity and frequency—are impossible to ignore. These negative images have been seared into our collective consciousness. It is no surprise that most Americans wrongly believe that Blacks are responsible for the majority of crime. No doubt, many of the suspects paraded across the nightly news are guilty criminals. The onslaught of criminal images of Black men, however, causes many of us to incorrectly conclude that most Black men are criminals. This is the myth of the criminalblackman.
Over the past year, countless black men have stepped forward to share their stories of how they have been forced into this myth. But very little has changed.
Racial profiling is nothing more than a delusion born of our belief that we can profile danger. We want to believe we can predict who will do the next terrible thing. We want to believe we can keep ourselves safe. It’s good that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is on the cover of Rolling Stone, tousled hair and all. We need a reminder that we must stop projecting our fears onto profiles built from stereotypes. We need a reminder that we will never truly know whom we need to fear.
The Racism We All Carry
In the Tony Award–winning Broadway musical Avenue Q, one of the most popular songs is “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.” The chorus ends, “Maybe it’s a fact we all should face / Everyone makes judgments based on race.” There’s a lot of truth to the song’s lyrics. Everyone holds certain judgments about others, and those judgments are often informed by race. We’re human. We’re flawed. Most people are simply at the mercy of centuries of cultural conditioning. Most people are a little bit racist, but they’re not marching in Klan rallies or burning crosses or vandalizing mosques. The better among us try, to varying degrees of success, to overcome that cultural conditioning, or—as revelations about popular, butter-loving former Food Network host Paula Deen suggest—we don’t.
Paula Deen, who lives in Savannah, Georgia, revels in southern culture, and her shows on Food Network, which aired for nearly fourteen years, paid decadent and unapologetic homage to all manner of southern cooking. She is a proud daughter of the South and, apparently, she carries the effects of the South’s complex and fraught racial history.
A former employee, Lisa Jackson, sued Deen and her brother, Earl “Bubba” Hiers, for workplace harassment. A damning transcript of Deen’s deposition found its way online, and in it, Deen reveals all manner of impolitic views on race. When asked if she used the N-word, Deen blithely replied, “Yes, of course,” as if it was a silly question, as if everyone uses the N-word. She’s probably right.
Deen goes on to explain that she used the word to describe a man who put a gun to her head during a holdup at the bank where she worked, as if this should justify the epithet. As Deen notes, she wasn’t feeling “real favorable towards him.” That’s fair enough. No one would feel favorable toward a man holding a gun to her head, though one sin, however more grave, should not justify another. Two wrongs rarely make a right.
She also discussed the racist, anti-Semitic, and redneck jokes told in her kitchens and how her husband regularly uses the N-word. When asked about how she identifies people by race, she said, “I try to go with whatever the black race is wanting to call themselves at each given time. I try to go along with that and remember that.” The entire transcript is as revealing as it is fascinating; it’s a bit funny and a bit sad because Deen is so honest and her attitude is utterly unsurprising. I suppose I should be outraged but I’m not. I’m actually baffled by how much attention the story received, where everyone seemed shocked that an older white woman from the Deep South is racist and harbors a nostalgia for the antebellum era. Or, perhaps, my lack of surprise reveals my own biases. Though I know better, I have certain ideas about the South. Is this where I say, “I have southern friends”?
The Internet responded vigorously, as it tends to do, when news broke of Deen’s racism or, as I’ve come to think of it, Deen’s general outlook on life. The Twitter hashtag #paulasbestdishes instantly went viral and all the major news sites have breathlessly hashed and rehashed what little we actually know from the deposition transcript, some hearsay, and a whole lot of speculation.
The most interesting part of the deposition is the blitheness of Deen’s responses and the complete lack of shame. Her attitude was one of a person who is surrounded by like-minded individuals, a person who has been so thoroughly culturally conditioned that she doesn’t know any better and doesn’t have enough of a sense of self-preservation to tell a few little w
hite lies about her racial attitudes.
In truth, Deen does know better. She has, certainly, never said the N-word or made openly racist comments on air or in any of the countless media interviews she has done over the years. In the deposition she even acknowledges that she, her children, and her brother object to the N-word being used in “any cruel or mean behavior,” as if there’s a warm and friendly way for white people to use the word.
This entire debacle reveals how there are unspoken rules about racism. In her deposition, for whatever reason, Deen decided to break those rules or ignore them, or she believed she was rich and successful enough that the rules, frankly, no longer applied to her.
There is a complex matrix for when you can be racist and with whom. There are ways you behave in public and ways you behave in private. There are things you can say among friends, things you wouldn’t dare say anywhere else, that you must keep to yourself in public.
Writer Teju Cole succinctly identified why so many people are, seemingly, agog about these Deen revelations when he tweeted, “The real reason Paula Deen’s in the news is not because she’s racist, but because she broke the unwritten rules about how to be racist.” Most people are familiar with these rules. We suspect that everyone is, indeed, a little bit racist. It’s often not a question of if someone will reveal his or her racism to whatever degree but, rather, when. Or maybe it’s people of color who are familiar with these rules and willing to acknowledge they exist. Maybe it is people of color who wait, without bated breath, for that when.
My downstairs neighbors moved out. They were Korean, college students. I never met them but they seemed nice enough. They played loud music but it was never enough of a nuisance to complain. Who doesn’t like to party? When I went to pay my rent at the beginning of the month after they left, my landlord’s receptionist began detailing the extraordinary measures they were taking to air out the apartment because “you just wouldn’t believe the smell.” I nodded because I truly had no idea what to say, and then she leaned in to me and whispered, “You know how those people are.”