Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)
Page 37
The most poignant new ritual was the mic check—an artful solution to restrictions on amplified sound. When speakers needed to speak, they shouted their words in brief bursts to the circle around them, who then would repeat the words so that the next ring could hear them, and on until all the gathered had heard. The process favored elegant, accessible thinking. It allowed for immediate feedback. It released the generative power of a hip-hop cipher’s call-and-response. The mic check was a wave of ideas rippling outward in all directions, an echo heard around the world.
When Angela Davis stood for her mic check in Zuccotti Park in October, she said:
We challenge language. We transform language. We remain aware of all the resonances of the language we use.…
We must be aware when we say “Occupy Wall Street” that this country was founded on the genocidal occupation of indigenous lands. We must be aware when we say “Occupy Wall Street” or “Occupy Washington Square” that occupations in other countries are violent and brutal.…
At the same time transform the meaning of “occupation.” We turn “occupation” into something that is beautiful, something that brings community together. Something that calls for love and happiness and hope.16
NO COUNTRY FOR THE WEAK
As the 2012 election neared, an enshrouding sense of dread was descending. The Occupy encampments were gone. The birther controversy would not die. As billions in corporate money poured into shadowy super PACs the nation girded for what Mike Davis would call “the most racially polarized presidential election in American history.”17
Obama’s Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, had been born into wealth and political power. He vowed to undo Wall Street reform. He would privatize FEMA disaster services because government debt needed to be cut. He declared himself the mortal enemy of bad debtors. In the America of Romney’s speeches, families were rewarded for their hard work, in which they saved and got ahead, in which they could in old age look proudly back on their work and say, “We built that.”
But Romney was not a builder. He had grown his family fortune by playing shell games with debt. At his private equity investment firm, Bain Capital, Romney borrowed heavily to acquire existing companies, journalist Matt Taibbi wrote, “then [extracted] million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place.”18
He was a perfectly cynical candidate for the age of precarity. Underneath his mask of imperialist nostalgia was a culture warrior’s mindset. He saw the nation as divided between winners like himself and losers, whom he termed “the 47 percent,” the half of Americans “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”19
In Romney’s America, the winners had discarded any pretense of honor. They owed the losers nothing. His answer to the immigration issue was, he said, “self-deportation, which is: people decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here.”
Polls showed Republican enthusiasm, fueled by Tea Party reaction, ran much higher than Democratic.20 But as strategists stared at the changing map, they fretted about the math. In 1963, two months after the March on Washington, New York Republican Jacob Javits had tried to stop the Southern strategy before it started. He passionately pleaded with his party to stop defending segregation. “I am not for possible short-term gain at the risk of extinction,” he said. “I am, in short, for basing Republican strategy on the South’s future, not its past.”21 Javits was wrong in one sense—that “short-term gain” had lasted a half-century. But perhaps his future had finally arrived. After nearly a half century, the politics of the Southern strategy no longer added up. Republicans could only succeed through subtraction.
So not long after the 2010 elections swept in a new class of Tea Party freshman and state-level conservatives, Republicans loudly began challenging “voter fraud,” launching what the Brennan Center for Justice called “the biggest threat to voting rights in decades.”22 Their map of attack included the battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia, and six of the seven states in the old Southern strategy (now cult-gen gap) arc from South Carolina to Texas. Voter fraud was like beheaded bodies in the Arizona desert—a cognitive illusion. Demographic change was real.
Republicans quickly passed twenty-five voter suppression laws and two executive actions in nineteen states, including limitations on early and absentee voting, new restrictions on voter registration drives, and polling-day photo I.D. and proof-of-citizenship requirements. The Brennan Center noted that the laws could have disenfranchised five million voters. In fourteen states, the courts recognized the partisan overreach, and reversed or defanged the new laws.
The summer would bring more party discontent. During the 2012 Republican convention, some attendees pelted a Black CNN camerawoman with peanuts, shouting, “This is how we feed animals.” Not long afterward SB 1070 author Russell Pearce went down to double-digit defeat in an Arizona primary. South Carolina congressman Lindsey Graham told the Washington Post, “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”23
The gap between the party’s image of itself and its reality pushed the spectacle of the Republican convention to a strange climax. On a night of pomp and platitudes during which Romney was to accept the nomination—he would vow to “restore” Americans to an uncomplicated Reaganite past in which they might revert to their natural state, “optimistic and positive and confident in the future”—he would be derailed by what Jon Stewart called “a twelve-minute, improvised, avant-garde performance of ‘One Angry Man’” staged by Clint Eastwood.
In it, Eastwood spoke to an empty chair he imagined inhabited by President Obama, accusing him of, among other things, starting the war in Afghanistan. Ralph Ellison would not have missed the symbolism—the ghost in the chair, a screen for their fears. “I could never wrap my head around why the world and the president that Republicans describe bears so little resemblance to the world and the president that I experience,” Jon Stewart mused. “And now I know why. There is a President Obama that only Republicans can see.24
On election night in Costa Mesa, California, at the Westin South Coast Plaza, the state’s Republican Party had gathered to celebrate the Romney landslide that nearly all of the right-wing media had predicted. Party faithful—the women in red suits, the men in blue with red ties, the odd person dressed as Paul Revere—sat before a large flat screen broadcasting Fox News. A large flag hung on a back wall, and a small forest of flag stands were bunched forlornly in a corner.
Just fifteen minutes after the polls closed across the Golden State, Fox News, following every major network, declared Obama the winner. The crowd stared, stunned, as Karl Rove—who had leveraged and spent $390 million of conservative super PAC money attacking Obama and won exactly zero of his races—began arguing with newsroom staff that the election was not over. “That’s awkward!” laughed anchor Megyn Kelly.
A small tide of panic swept through the hotel ballroom. One legislative aide told an Orange County Register reporter, “These next four years are going to be about Obama’s revenge. We’re going to see the elimination of our freedom. It’s going to be like communist Vietnam.”25 On the small stage a local rock band launched into a loud, epic-length version of the Rolling Stones’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” The ballroom began emptying very quickly.
Obama’s victory was less decisive than it had been in 2008, and the mood this time was decidedly sober. President Obama had been reelected with 51 percent of the popular vote and 332 electoral votes. Mitt Romney won a poetic 47 percent. Over 7 in 10 Latinos and Asians, and 3 of 4 gays, lesbians, and bisexuals voted for Obama. Romney won 6 in 10 whites, bu
t 3 in 10 voters were now nonwhite.
Seven months later, the conservative-led Supreme Court all but invoked the demographic shifts underpinning Obama’s victory when they declared portions of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “Things have changed dramatically.”
In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg scoffed at the majority’s logic. They had relied, she wrote, “on increases in voter registration and turnout as if that were the whole story. One would expect more from an opinion striking at the heart of the Nation’s signal piece of civil-rights legislation.” Voiding the antidiscrimination preclearance portion of the act, she added, was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
Within hours of the decision, the storms moved in again. The Republican-led legislature in Texas approved a voter ID law and redistricting maps that feds had blocked for discriminating against Black and Latino voters. In six more states—including Arizona, South Dakota, and four Southern states—politicians began preparing to do the same.
The campaign had been brutal, the nation more divided, and more conflict lay ahead.
THE QUALITY OF EMPATHY
In 2006, then-senator Obama was in high demand as a speaker, and before audiences of young people at conferences and university commencements he presented himself in a way that his later successes would no longer allow—as a pure idealist. He seemed to have inherited from Martin Luther King Jr., the multiculturalists, and even the post-multiculturalists an expansive faith in American democracy.
At Xavier University in New Orleans almost exactly a year after Hurricane Katrina, Senator Obama admitted to graduates that he might have given a speech on challenges, on courage, or on community—but that nothing he could say would be better than what the students and residents had taught him about those topics over the previous year. So instead he asked them to think about their future and how it related to what they had learned in the previous year.
“After graduating from a great school like Xavier, you’ll pretty much be able to punch your own ticket,” he said. “You can live in neighborhoods with people who are exactly like yourself, and send your kids to the same schools, and narrow your concerns to what’s going on in your own little circle.
“Pundits and politicians will affirm that the problems of the nation and the world are,” he said, “someone else’s fault and someone else’s problem to fix. They’ll tell you that the Americans who sleep in the streets and beg for food got there because they’re all lazy or weak of spirit. That the immigrants who risk their lives to cross a desert have nothing to contribute to this country and no desire to embrace our ideals. That the inner-city children who are trapped in dilapidated schools can’t learn and won’t learn and so we should just give up on them entirely.”
“And when you hear all this, the easiest thing in the world will be to do nothing at all.”
But he challenged them to take a more difficult path, “to leave here and not just pursue your own individual dreams, but to help perfect our collective dream as a nation.”
“There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit,” he said. “But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit—the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us.” He concluded:
I ask you to take this second path—this harder path—not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate, although you do have that obligation. Not because you have a debt to all of those who helped you get to where you are, although you do have that debt.
I ask you to take it because you have an obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on our collective salvation.26
Obama had drawn on King’s idea of the nation as “an inescapable network of mutuality.” Katrina reminded us that our destiny depended upon how we treated each other. If we could dissolve our illusions, overcome our blindnesses, and end our silences with real talk, we might still hope to find that beloved community.
INTO THE DARKNESS
But then there were these pictures.
There was the picture of George Zimmerman in his red jacket, his nose bloodied. And there was another, taken of the back of his shaven head, two abrasions with blood fanning down in drips.
There was the picture of Trayvon Martin, covered by a yellow bag, lying to the right of a wet sidewalk, a number 6 placed next to his inert body, just one high-top Nike poking out into the dark night.
And finally, most shockingly, there was the picture of Trayvon Martin before the bag had been placed over him. He lay on the same grass on which he had played pickup football games with the kids in the gated community of the Retreat at Twin Lakes.
His body, which had been found facedown, had been turned over. His arms were askew. One of his legs was crossed under the other, a small ankle peeking out of skinny, cuffed khakis. His gray hoodie, decorated with a memorial button of a friend, had a hole to the left of the button, where he had been shot through the heart. His eyes were half-shut, his mouth locked in its last gasp.
In the end, when a verdict came down, the easiest questions to answer were how George Zimmerman saw Trayvon Martin and how the law failed to see Trayvon Martin.
Behind the gates of the Retreat at Twin Lakes, on a rainy Sunday evening in late February, just three weeks before his eighteenth birthday, Trayvon Martin had come from Miami to visit the home of his father Tracy’s fiancée, Brandy Green. The adults were out having dinner. Martin and Green’s son were settling in to watch the game. But first Martin decided to make a solo snack run to the nearby 7-Eleven. As he returned, he looked up the number of an old friend he had known since second grade, a Haitian American girl named Rachel Jeantel. The moon was waxing crescent. The rain and wind picked up. He put up his hood to protect himself from the cold.
He was walking back past the townhouse community’s gated entrance—slowly limbering home in his long six-foot-plus, 150-pound frame, his earbuds in and $22, a pack of Skittles, and an AriZona watermelon-flavored drink in his pockets—when George Zimmerman, the community’s neighborhood watch leader, spotted him. Zimmerman had been driving toward the entrance in his truck, getting ready to leave on an errand, but now he stopped to call 911.
Race begins in the gap between appearance and the perception of difference.
“Hey we’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood, and there’s a real suspicious guy,” Zimmerman told the dispatcher in a low whisper. “This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.”
The young Black boys in the neighborhood were already familiar with Zimmerman. “He would circle the block and circle it; it was weird,” a seventeen-year-old told Frances Robles of the Miami Herald. “If he had spotted me, he’d probably asked me if I lived here. He was known for being really strict.”27 Now Zimmerman, a Kel-Tec PF9 9 mm handgun holstered and concealed at his waist, decided to tail Martin in his truck.
The Retreat at Twin Lakes was located on the far western end of the Florida suburb of Sanford, just a half hour north from Orlando, where the 2012 NBA All-Star Game had just started. In the mid-1940s a mob had come to the mayor, demanding that he run a young Black baseball player named Jackie Robinson out of town. As late as 1982, students at the local high school elected two homecoming queens—one white, one Black.28 By the 2000s, Sanford was over 40 percent nonwhite.
The gated community had opened in 2006 at the height of the market with 263 modest townhome condos that included granite countertops, hardwood floors, and walk-in closets. “With its modern Florida architecture,” a spokesmodel told buyers in a promotional video, “this secluded, gated community is like living in a resort.”29 But the Great Recession had hit the area hard and left many mortgages underwater and units foreclosed. Buyers scooped up units on short sales.
For Frank Taaffe—Zimmerman’s neighbor, a former block c
aptain, and a white-power activist who would become one of Zimmerman’s biggest media defenders—that was the beginning of the end. The demographics of the gated community shifted, tipping past half nonwhite. He complained to the Miami Herald’s Robles that the homes were being rented to “low-lifes and gangsters.”30
The Zimmermans, Tracy Martin, and Brandy Green were middle-class strivers and renters. Tracy Martin was a truck driver. Green worked as a juvenile detention officer. Zimmerman had been a mortgage broker in the early 2000s. But after the market tanked, he spun through odd jobs before finally landing a job at Digital Risk, a “mortgage-risk firm.” His job was to comb through borrowers’ data to ferret out potential loan fraud, helping big banks file claims against debtors.
Zimmerman aspired to become a cop. He studied criminal justice. After moving in to the Retreat at Twin Lakes in 2009, he became a frequent 911 caller. Lane DeGregory of the Tampa Bay Times wrote, “The transcripts of Zimmerman’s 911 calls during the more than 2 years he lived on Retreat View Circle fill 28 pages.”31
In September 2011, after a series of burglaries, including one in which a white mother hid in a bedroom with her infant as two African American men robbed their home, Zimmerman organized a Neighborhood Watch meeting and was voted the captain. He knocked on doors and advised his neighbors to buy guns. Around that time Zimmerman’s 911 calls, DeGregory wrote, “seemed to shift, zeroing in on Black males.”32
Zimmerman’s Black neighbors began changing their routines. Ibrahim Rashada stopped his casual walks around the community. “I fit the stereotype he emailed around,” he told the Miami Herald’s Robles. “Listen, you even hear me say it: ‘A Black guy did this. A Black guy did that.’ So I said, ‘Let me sit in the house. I don’t want anyone chasing me.’”33 Two weeks before the killing, the Retreat at Twin Lakes’s Twitter feed was updated: “Our Neighborhood Watch leads to four arrests in burglaries in the RTL. Great job!”
Much of what we know of the murder comes from phone calls—in succession, Zimmerman’s 911 call, Martin’s call to his elementary school friend Rachel Jeantel, resident Jenna Lauer’s 911 call, and then a sudden flurry of 911 calls from other residents.