Race Had Something to Do With It

[Content Note: Violence; racism.]

Race "had nothing to do with" George Zimmerman stalking and killing Trayvon Martin, and race "had nothing to do with" the verdict of the almost entirely white jury that found Zimmerman not guilty of murder, or even manslaughter, in the killing of a black teenage boy. So say white supremacist apologists. Because they are mendacious fucks.

But race appears to have had something to do with this case:

The not-guilty verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman has produced dramatically different reactions among blacks and whites, with African Americans overwhelmingly disapproving of the jury's decision and a bare majority of whites saying they approve of the outcome, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

...The new survey underscores not only the gap between whites and blacks, but also how passionate many African Americans are about the case. Among African Americans, 86 percent say they disapprove of the verdict — with almost all of them saying they strongly disapprove — and 87 percent saying the shooting was unjustified.

In contrast, 51 percent of whites say they approve of the verdict while just 31 percent disapprove. There is also a partisan overlay to the reaction among whites: 70 percent of white Republicans but only 30 percent of white Democrats approve of the verdict. Among all whites, one-third say the shooting was unjustified, one-third say it was justified and the other third say they didn't know enough to have an opinion.

That's an interesting frame—that black people are "passionate" about the case, since "passionate" is frequently wielded as a dog-whistle against marginalized populations to suggest we are "oversensitive."

Another way to frame it is that black people are more engaged with this case because white privilege affords white people the luxury of apathy—and abets the pathetic fantasy that race is irrelevant in the stalking and killing of a black boy by a not-black man.

It also enables the garbage belief that these poll results are merely reflective of something within a void around the case, and not evidence of the racist culture in which the crime and trial happened in the first place.

White apologists will defend the disparity with tired arguments about how they are just more objective, ignoring that privilege doesn't not make one more objective; it merely gives one a different perspective—that of someone who benefits from oppression, as opposed to being marginalized by it.

The truth is, a justice system that systematically disenfranchises black jurors and disproportionately favors white jurors in a culture where whiteness is privileged and white people view themselves as objective arbiters of crimes that "have nothing to do with" race, is not a system of justice. It's an institutional-level Validity Prism.