After Trayvon Martin

I heard/read three stories on the same day that left me really wondering about the meaning of the death of Trayvon Martin. I tried to write about it in what I'd characterize as my normal style--something like loosely stringing together ideas around a topic in an attempt to provoke thought? I think it's too delicate to be indirect.

I caught the tail end of an audio essay on All Things Considered the other day. A young black man name Miles Best was delivering what I thought was going to be the third in a series of essays I'd heard chronicling the unfair and unfortunate but necessary instructions that the mothers of black boys impart to their children. Basically the intent of all of these instructions is to communicate the importance of seeming non-threatening, in a world that is predisposed to seeing a threat in a black male. Mr. Best closed his essay brilliantly and made me think. In his closing sentence he didn't characterize himself as being seen as a threat, but a target.

The other two articles are linked here:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/07/17/202956379/rolling-stones-tsarnaev-cover-whats-stirring-such-passion


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=202729367


For the lazy among you I will summarize:

The first link is NPR's take on the Rolling Stone Tsarnaev cover. The part of the angle is that when white people do heinous things, we look for a reason--bad family, bad upbringing, trauma etc.

The second is a piece about high school students transcending gender. If that doesn't make you want to read it, I don't know what will!


It all cooked down in my mind to this:
Seeing young black men as a threat is an absurd position, defensible only with a heavy reliance on skewed anecdote. The contention that in fact, young black men are a target, a representation of something non blacks want to kill is repugnant. When two people meet on the street, after dark, and one is packing; which one is the threat? The only part left for Martin to play was the target. Once this sank in, I was angry.

Then, faced with the reality that when white people commit atrocities, apparently premeditated atrocities, they are apologized for, I almost lost hope.

Until I heard the kids! At first I dismissed them as absurd. However, I'm a sucker for equal parts idealism and immaturity. It's a winning combination. I'm not implying that maturity is good and immaturity is bad either. Immaturity is just fleeting, but idealism...you can hang onto that.

By the time my daughter is to make her own way in this world she will be a minority in our country. Maybe by then it won't matter. As we white's lose our numerical dominance, I'm sure our apologists will grow louder before they are silenced. But even if they aren't, if the adolescents in this story characterize the audience, it won't matter. And as for some being targets or threats...When selection of a gender pronoun takes discussion, I don't see any practical way to generate race and gender stereotypes. If these teens have their way, you'd have to spend an hour every morning defining the shifting description of everyone you wanted to hate for that day. I must admit, I wasn't offended by this last story, but I did feel a touch of bewilderment. That was until I realized that definition is a key ingredient in hatred. You can love everyone. But you can't hate everyone, we've all got moms and kids etc. If you are going to hate, you must define. And it seems like that is getting more complicated.

So maybe my daughter won't be out of touch after growing up in a beach town. We are removed from a lot of violence. We are also removed from the dynamic thought that might expunge some of the violence form our culture. We probably aren't part of the problem, but we aren't part of the solution either. Or maybe we are .... everyone is here to go to the beach. In cheap trunks with your nine dollar flip flops and your Mercedes, or Civic--whichever the case may be--parked at the cottage, we all seem remarkably the similar. In a world where we are remarkably similar, fewer of us get shot.