Criminal law, Justice, Society

Racism, Once Removed

By Mike Appleton, Guest Blogger

“However, law is not color-blind.  Law, as the great Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, is about experience.  Culturally competent law practice requires that one understand societal realities and experiences and the legal implications they evoke.  To do otherwise is to engage in wishful thinking at best.”

– Wendell Griffen, “Lessons from Florida v. George,” wendellgriffen.blogspot.com (August 1, 2013)

The best man at my wedding in 1968 was, and is, a gay man.  We were roommates as freshmen and he became my best friend in college.  He has had a very successful career and has been in a committed relationship for many years.  We don’t see each other often, but we remain good friends to this day.  And if you had told me in 1968 that forty-five years later there would be preachers urging that homosexuals be confined behind electrified razor wire, or politicians lobbying for the death penalty for the “crime” of being gay, or pseudo-therapists insisting that sexual orientation is a “lifestyle” choice amenable to counseling, or seemingly rational people arguing against full legal equality for all human beings, I would have dismissed your opinion as absurd fantasy.  And I would have been wrong.

But I would likewise have rejected in 1968 any suggestion that almost fifty years thence racism would still permeate American society.  After all, most of the landmark victories in civil rights had occurred by that year.  The courts had issued decrees ending the legislated segregation that had successfully held a race in bondage for a hundred years following the abolition of slavery.  Martin Luther King had cajoled and shamed a nation into adopting laws prohibiting discrimination in education, employment, housing and public accommodations.  The right to vote, that most fundamental guarantee of participation in the life of the nation, had finally become real for millions of citizens.  Racial intolerance would be forever buried with the bodies of its then living adherents.  And I would again have been wrong.

The election of Barack Obama as President in 2008 was heralded by many as the dawning of a new age, the age of post-racial America.   In his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention, then Sen. Obama had declared,  “There is not a Black America and a White America and a Latino America and an Asian America-there’s the United States of America.”  Liberals wanted to believe that the election results had validated that speech.  The political right argued that the election of a black President meant that racial equality had become a reality and demanded an end to affirmative action and other programs deemed oppressive to whites.  The Supreme Court under John Roberts has been happy to oblige conservatives, steadily eroding the foundations of race-based preferences and, most recently, virtually emasculating the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Contrary to the hopes of liberals and the beliefs of Justice Roberts, the notion of a post-racial America remains a dream.  If anything, the Obama presidency has brought into clear focus the extent to which racism remains a core feature of society.  We saw its ugliness in both election campaigns.  Throughout his time in office, the President has been castigated as a socialist, a Muslim (or Muslim sympathizer), a despot and an illegitimate pretender.  An Associated Press poll taken in October of 2012 found that anti-black attitudes had increased among whites from 51% to 56% between 2008 and 2012.  When he arrived in Orlando two days ago to speak to a Disabled American Veterans convention, the President was greeted by a number of protesters, some of them bearing signs reading “Kenyan Go Home.”

 

But for me the most telling reminder of the sad state of race relations in this country was the recently completed trial in the case of State of Florida v. George Zimmerman.  I know.  The demands of due process were satisfied.  The jury has spoken.  As a lawyer, that ought to be sufficient for me.  Anyone who has tried cases before a jury has had the experience of winning a losing case and losing a case that ought to have been won.  The system has been crafted over hundreds of years to enable decisions based upon relevant evidence of facts and reasoned principles of law.  We strive for the approximation of justice, because that is the best that we can do.

Yet the verdict in the Zimmerman trial is disturbing.  I cannot bring myself to accept the result as approximate justice.  And I am not alone. Recent polling by the Washington Post disclosed an even split of opinion among Americans on the verdict.  An overwhelming majority of black Americans disapproved of the jury’s conclusions, and only a slim majority of whites supported it.

The sides lined up long before the trial even began.  Blacks widely portrayed the death of Trayvon Martin as an act of cold-blooded murder. Supporters of Mr. Zimmerman in turn described Mr. Martin as a teenager out of control, a thug with a history of violent fantasies and an attitude prone to trouble.  The public was certain that the case was about race.  And despite the efforts of Mr. Zimmerman’s lawyers to eliminate race as an issue, it was in fact the unspoken them of the entire defense.  I say this because the legal justification for Mr. Martin’s death was predicated upon a series of assumptions that are fundamentally racist.  Consider the following themes:

1.  As a resident of the subdivision and a self-styled neighborhood watch captain, Mr. Zimmerman had a right to be present in the neighborhood that was superior to that of Mr. Martin.

2.  Because Mr. Martin was an outsider, Mr. Zimmerman had a right to question the legitimacy of the former’s actions.

3.  Mr. Martin had a duty to justify himself to Mr. Zimmerman.

None of these assumptions was seriously questioned in the course of the trial.  The defense created a foundation which wholly lacked any consideration of reciprocal duties.  The jury was told that Mr. Zimmerman had a right to follow Mr. Martin.  The jury was told that Mr. Martin had a responsibility to explain himself.  Why?  Mr. Martin had neither a legal nor moral obligation to account to Mr. Zimmerman for any reason.  Yet Mr. Zimmerman was somehow clothed with quasi-official status.

Moreover, Mr. Zimmerman created the conditions which directly led to Mr. Martin’s death.  First, he unilaterally determined that Mr. Martin was likely preparing to engage in criminal activity.  And the evidence for that conclusion?  Mr. Martin was black, was wearing a hoodie and was walking down the street after dark.  Second, Mr. Zimmerman continued to follow Mr. Martin after being told by a sheriff’s dispatcher that he should relent until the police arrived.  Does anyone seriously believe that a black 17 year-old walking down unfamiliar streets at night while being followed by an unknown person in a vehicle might not have reason to become alarmed?  Third, Mr. Zimmerman was armed, a blatant violation of the rules under which bona-fide neighborhood watch volunteers are supposed to operate. Mr. Zimmerman crossed the line from vigilance to vigilantism.  The fact that Mr. Martin may have initiated the physical altercation is both understandable and pathetically deficient as a justification for homicide.

The response to the verdict was also predictable.  The black community compared the case to Emmett Till, the black teenager viciously murdered in Mississippi in 1955.  Many whites shared the views of Ann Coulter, who routinely reminds us that a substantial investment in an elite education does not always produce beneficial results, and who concluded, “Trayvon committed the first (and only) crime that night by assaulting Zimmerman.”

The truth is that Mr. Zimmerman was in the best position to prevent the death of Trayvon Martin.  But he made a series of faulty assumptions based upon race.  As a result he became a predator who, when confronted by his prey, killed him.  Racism provided the occasion of Mr. Martin’s death; a dangerous extension of the law of self-defense provided the justification.

We legislate morality, but we cannot legislate moral thinking.  The elimination of statutory racism and the election of an African-American President are important milestones, but they are only steps in a long journey.  Trayvon Martin was not Emmett Till.  His death was not the result of institutionalized and state approved violence.  He was instead the victim of the racism of profiling, the racism of generalization and false assumptions.  It is racism once removed from the protection of the law.  But it is a racism which still kills.

 

195 thoughts on “Racism, Once Removed”

  5. elaine i dont laugh at these STATISTICS because they are not funny.

    I find it pathetic that the apology parade ignores the stats or makes excuses. THAT is FAR more of a problem for the country and race relations than ‘white racists’.

  6. AY,

    I thought manslaughter was a solid call, murder two possible but a harder proposition to prove. Were I the prosecution, I’d have filed manslaughter from a tactical standpoint. The murder two charge was a distraction that undermined what would have been a much more solid case with the lesser charge from the start. It also smacked of playing to the media and grandstanding instead of just doing the job with an eye toward justice.
    ____________

    Squeek,

    Speaking for myself, I don’t care if racists are intimidated or not by being called out on their bigotry. If they were decent human beings, the appropriate reaction wouldn’t be fear anyway. It’d be shame. Fear seems like an odd reaction that would indicate some sort of mens rea on their part. To be clear, bigots are free to be bigots all they like and spew their gibberish all they like. Others are equally free to point it out, note that such behavior is anti-egalitarian, ignorant, and unethical and to make fun of them when I find it amusing. That freedom of speech, she is a two-edged sword. If bigots don’t like that some greet bigotry with derision, then perhaps they should reconsider being a bigot.

  7. imagine that. Only 13% of the population and they commit easily the most violent crimes. Keep burying your heads in the sand tho.

    ——-

    Hispanic and Latino Americans amount to 15% of the population, making up the largest minority.[5]

    African Americans are the largest racial minority, amounting to nearly 13% of the population.[4][6]

    The White, non-Hispanic or Latino population make up 63% of the nation’s total.[5]

  9. uh rafflaw, look again. Blacks for example from your own link were responsible for 53% of the murders.

    ‘Whites’ data is bogus because it includes hispanics who also commit far more crime than whites.

    Of the offenders for whom race was known, 53.1 percent were black, 44.6 percent were white, and 2.3 percent were of other races. The race was unknown for 4,224 offenders. (Based on Expanded Homicide Data Table 3.)

  10. @ElaineM:

    Oh, thank you! You are right. Being smart sucks! You just see right through stuff, and when the crowd goes off chasing a wild goose, you don’t . . .because you know it’s just a wild goose. Sooo, there you sit all alone, with your two cats, and a guitar, trying to make a B chord that doesn’t sound sloppy, which is hard when you have little hands. And on the TV, Naked City is playing, sooo you can learn about old timey people and stuff.
    And you type stuff on the computer to make people laugh, and hopefully think. On second thought, maybe that isn’t sooo sad after all???

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

  12. I think you have given an accurate description of racism in several areas.

    And I agree that racism played a major role in the death of Martin.

    Yet I would argue that the acquittal of Zimmerman is more likely due to the deeply flawed SYG law.

    Until SYG laws are replaced with more traditional standards for self defense we can be assured there will be more deaths in situations which could have and should have been resolved with little violence.

  14. @Anon:

    Oh, I know. They are used to intimidating people by calling them “racists”, and for the longest it worked and they never had to do a lick of thinking on their own. But those days are gone. And all those “racist” numbers you keep pulling out! (Can numbers even be racist???) Anyway, you are destroying the fantasy for them. They want it to be 1963 still! They think all those bars on the windows in the poor black neighborhoods are there to keep Klansmen out! ROTFLMAO!

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

  15. Squeeky, the bleeding heart ignorant progressives are not interested in facts. They only want to deal in emotion based nonsense that makes them feel better in their fantasy land that they live in that only exists in their dreams.

    Anything that does not involve you agreeing with them that big bad whitey is the bad guy will end in them calling you a racist.

  16. What about interracial crime, white-on-black attacks and the reverse?

    After researching the FBI numbers for “Suicide of a Superpower,” this writer concluded: “An analysis of ‘single offender victimization figures’ from the FBI for 2007 finds blacks committed 433,934 crimes against whites, eight times the 55,685 whites committed against blacks. Interracial rape is almost exclusively black on white — with 14,000 assaults on white women by African Americans in 2007. Not one case of a white sexual assault on a black female was found in the FBI study.”

    Though blacks are outnumbered 5-to-1 in the population by whites, they commit eight times as many crimes against whites as the reverse. By those 2007 numbers, a black male was 40 times as likely to assault a white person as the reverse.

    If interracial crime is the ugliest manifestation of racism, what does this tell us about where racism really resides — in America?

    And if the FBI stats for 2007 represent an average year since the Tawana Brawley rape-hoax of 1987, over one-third of a million white women have been sexually assaulted by black males since 1987 — with no visible protest from the civil rights leadership.

    Today, 73 percent of all black kids are born out of wedlock. Growing up, these kids drop out, use drugs, are unemployed, commit crimes and are incarcerated at many times the rate of Asians and whites — or Hispanics, who are taking the jobs that used to go to young black Americans.

    Are white vigilantes or white cops really Black America’s problem?

  18. In New York from January to June 2008, 83 percent of all gun assailants were black, according to witnesses and victims, though blacks were only 24 percent of the population. Blacks and Hispanics together accounted for 98 percent of all gun assailants. Forty-nine of every 50 muggings and murders in the Big Apple were the work of black or Hispanic criminals.

    New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly confirms Mac Donald’s facts. Blacks and Hispanics commit 96 percent of all crimes in the city, he says, but only 85 percent of the stop-and-frisks are of blacks and Hispanics.

    And these may involve the kind of pat-downs all of us have had at the airport.

    Is stop-and-frisk the work of racist cops in New York, where the crime rate has been driven down to levels unseen in decades?

    According to Kelly, a majority of his police force, which he has been able to cut from 41,000 officers to 35,000, is now made up of minorities.

    But blacks are also, per capita, the principal victims of crime. Would black fathers prefer their sons to grow up in Chicago, rather than low-crime New York City, with its stop-and-frisk policy?

    Fernando Mateo, head of the New York taxicab union, urges his drivers to profile blacks and Hispanics for their own safety: “The God’s honest truth is that 99 percent of the people that are robbing, stealing, killing these drivers are blacks and Hispanics.”

    Mateo is what The New York Times would describe as “a black Hispanic” Yet he may be closer to the ‘hood than Holder, who says he was stopped by police when running to a movie — in Georgetown.

  19. SF just keeps the hits coming. Do you and David have a bet or something?

  20. Mike Appleton.

    Where the hell has the corrections thread disappeared?

    Since I cannot find it I post this correction to your post above here.

    “……….. it was in fact the unspoken them of the defense”

    should be

    “……….. it was in fact the unspoken theme of the defense”

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