When you have a society that takes at its founding the hatred and degradation of a people, when that society inscribes that degradation in its most hallowed document, and continues to inscribe hatred in its laws and policies, it is fantastic to believe that its citizens will derive no ill messaging.
It is painful to say this: Trayvon Martin is not a miscarriage of American justice, but American justice itself. This is not our system malfunctioning. It is our system working as intended. To expect our juries, our schools, our police to single-handedly correct for this, is to look at the final play in the final minute of the final quarter and wonder why we couldn’t come back from twenty-four down.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, July 15, 2013
On May 15, 1916, Jesse Washington, a 17-year-old black farm worker, had an encounter with the American justice system the results of which are shown in the photo collage at the top of this post. I’ve thought a lot about Jesse since learning of Trayvon Martin’s death last year. Jesse’s lynching was not an anomaly; thousands of black men and women met a similar fate—their deaths commemorated on widely distributed postcards.
Ta-Nehisi Coates refers to the injustice of the Zimmerman verdict as having been “…authored by a country which has taken as its policy, for the lionshare of its history, to erect a pariah class.” While public lynchings have been (thankfully) relegated to the history pages, the death of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman’s subsequent acquittal serves as a stark reminder of how ingrained and intrinsic racism is in this country. When Touré, co-host of MSNBC’s The Cycle, takes to the pages of Time Magazine to offer his “Eight talking points about the potentially fatal condition of being black” and concludes with (#8):
Never forget: As far as we can tell, Trayvon did nothing wrong and still lost his life. You could be a Trayvon. Any of us could.
His words do not ring hollow or false. To be a young, black male in this society is to be a pariah, an outcast, an undesirable, always guilty until proven innocent, always suspect. The fates of Jesse Washington and Trayvon Martin are symptomatic of an illness that’s been eating away at the core of our identity as a nation since its inception: we do not, contrary to Jefferson’s idealistic assertion, believe or hold the self-evident truth that all men are created equal and/or entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Isn’t it time we stopped pretending we live in a racially-blind society?
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2 responses to “Jesse Washington”
There are many threads woven into the atrocious injustice this decision embodies. Racism is part of it, but not all of it. Indeed, racism is one of a host of tools that are leveraged by reactionary and monied interests — they deliberately and with great skill foment fears and hatreds across many sectors. A fearful society embraces authoritarians; a fearful society trades freedoms for “security”; a fearful society doesn’t question authority; a fearful society sacrifices people who lack power as collateral damage. Hate, meanwhile, energizes and focuses attention. Hate narrows, it occupies, it simplifies. Hate, carefully fed and nurtured, goes on and on and on. It’s evergreen.
It IS time to stop pretending we live in a racially-blind society. But while we acknowledge America’s problems with racism, we also need to pay very close attention to why it exists, and who it serves.
FOX NEWS and all the satellite professional haters that FOX pays, promotes and supports were literally salivating at the thought of race riots breaking out after the Zimmerman decision. Why?
It’s important for us all to recognize the atrociousness of these events and this decision, but I think it’s also very important that we start coming to grips with the larger context in which it occurred. It occurred in an America where organizations like ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), a conservative group, writes legislation like Stand Your Ground, hands it off to conservative republican lawmakers and guides them into enacting it. ALEC is funded by large public corporations who use it to transmit corporate-friendly desires into law. ALEC helps gun manufacturers lobby against background checks and all other simple, common sense checks on gun availability.
ALEC promotes prison privatization and school privatization. Once privatized, these “companies” have to make profits — prisons by being filled, schools by paying teachers less while paying administrators more, more and more. Both get money from the government — our tax dollars. Tax dollars that inevitably flow UP to a few, at the expense of the many.
Trayvon Martin is collateral damage in an America containing multitudes of George Zimmermans — people who have absorbed the message that they can’t get ahead because Black people get all the breaks. Think about how twisted that is. In America, Black people are the receivers of every injustice there is. They go to jail when white people routinely go free or get wrist-slapped for the same crimes. They suffer from higher unemployment, lower wages, poorer health. And now, thanks to ALEC and compliant republicans (and in many cases, compliant Democrats), Black people can be shot with impunity in Florida. Yet there are people who spend their days being outraged and angry at Black people (and Immigrants) because. . . why, exactly?
I would submit, because they’re being led there. Because the more people are kept focused on powerless people, the less they focus on the people who actually have the power, and who use it to keep wages low, unemployment high, executive salaries high, and corporate taxes low or nonexistent. Keep poor black people populating for-profit prisons, while very rich white people on Wall Street pay no penalties at all for committing massive financial crimes. Pay large banks 100 cents on the dollar for losses they engineered, but break every promise made to union employees and pension holders.
There’s a lot of unhappy people in America who’s energies have been directed towards hating other struggling people. You know what would do a lot to diffuse or refocus that energy?
Jobs. Living wages. Security. Affordable Healthcare. A future.
I cannot excuse the kinds of human beliefs and behaviors that result in horrible violences against others. But I also, almost more, cannot excuse people who are rich, educated, comfortable and perfectly happy to foment conditions that cause others to engage in aggressive and sometimes savage acts against others. People who spend money to create hate. People who earn money by expressing hate. America is full of them and they’re everywhere where there’s money and power. “Religious” leaders who promote the “prosperity gospel”. “Christians” who quote the Old Testament and have long since removed “Christ” from their versions of Christianity. Corrupt politicians and judges. Even more corrupt Financiers. Media figures who make it acceptable to be racist, resentful and threatening.
George Zimmerman is very small figure in the larger scheme, but he is the product of the larger scheme. There’s a lot of Trayvon Martin’s blood to go around — it’s on a lot of people’s hands, most of whom live a long way from Florida.
If I can piggyback on what you said, Paula, many of the societal movements of the past 75 years reveal themselves to be racist. The building of the suburbs, the emergence as the car as a symbol of personal autonomy, the dismantling of the streetcar systems (all bought up by GM!), the construction of the Eisenhower Interstate System, McMansions, the insidious push of America into oil addiction: all are tied together. They have all had as their basis the goal of making sure that white folks of a certain socioeconomic status and higher would not have to defile themselves by coming into contact with someone of color.