Trayvon Martin is a name that I really wish I didn’t know
right now. It’s a name that will haunt my dreams, a name that pops up every
time I see a black teenager walking down the street innocently minding their
business yet loaded with so many stereotypes they might as well just dig a hole
and crawl into it. Trayvon Martin, unlike so many victims this world has seen,
is a name still too fresh to consign it into the history books as one of those
issues that happened in the bad old days, it’s something that happened a few weeks
ago, while I watched TV or sat reading ‘A
Song of Ice and Fire’. While I sat here enjoying the liberty of being
alive, Trayvon Martin was shot to death for the crime of being alive.
For those of you not familiar with the case; Trayvon was a
17 year old black teenager living in the state of Florida in the United States
of America. On the evening of the 26th of February 2012, Trayvon
decided to go to the shops to, amongst other things, buy a bar of chocolate for
his little brother. On the way home he was spotted by George Zimmerman, who for
reasons best known to himself, started following Trayvon. Zimmerman called 911
to report a suspicious character, telling the dispatcher that Trayvon “looked
high”, and was staring at buildings. Meanwhile Trayvon who was on the phone
with his girlfriend told her he was being followed. She urged him to run, he
refused, but as panic began to set in he fled, quickly followed by Zimmerman.
This is not a fairy-tale; they did not suddenly come to a
realisation of the absurdity of the situation, they did not meet as two people
who lived in the same neighbourhood and share pleasantries about the weather.
Against the advice of the 911 dispatcher Zimmerman cornered Trayvon, who
apparently was now in a panic, and shot him. In the chest.
He is dead. I wish I could say that he is on CNN right now
telling reporters about the absurd encounter in his own neighbourhood, laughing
about it as the passage of time robs those fateful moments of their horror but
no. He is dead and lying in a grave, his chocolates swept into a gutter
somewhere, the chocolates that turned into his only defence against a man
almost twice his age. He is dead and the silence is deafening, social media has
not been set ablaze the way it burned with #Kony2012. Oprah hasn’t yet
interviewed his family whose grieving at the senseless death must be just as
valid as those who ‘grieved’ on Facebook at the innocent victims of Kony’s
rampage. As I type this, halfway across the world in France, police are holed
up outside the home of a suspected shooter yet in the United States of America,
George Zimmerman is sitting at home, I picture him drinking hot chocolate and
watching a rerun of Days of our Lives.
There is an injustice here! Do you see it? Do you see it
marked out in big letters, screaming between the headlines. There is a 17 year
old boy who is dead because a man took it upon himself to label him, in the
same way we label strangers we meet every day. The woman wearing a headscarf
must be oppressed by Islam, she needs to be saved. The black guy standing at
the traffic lights selling sunglasses must be a high school dropout. But unlike
us, George Zimmerman took those labels and made them real, made them living
things, out of thin air George Zimmerman imagined the crack Trayvon must have
been smoking. George imagined the slum Trayvon must live in, imagined that the
only reason he was walking down the streets of Zimmerman’s neighbourhood was
because he was planning a robbery. He was black, perhaps he was uneducated,
illiterate, perhaps he didn’t understand English. How else does one explain George’s
apparent failure to engage Trayvon in a conversation, ascertain in a non-lethal
manner what “he was doing here”.
But then again, why did Trayvon have to justify his
existence? Was his presence in that neighbourhood a crime against humanity? Was
his world not designed to have rolling lawns and gated neighbourhoods, was his
life one pledged to a gang, was the thing he was holding in his pocket a gun,
ready to shoot the first innocent bystander? Surely George Zimmerman was saving
the world. Some woman could sleep better that night knowing that Trayvon was
shot dead, some poor High School cheerleader was not going to get raped and
George’s flat screen Samsung LCD TV wasn’t going to be stolen. Surely, George
Zimmerman is a hero, acting in self-defence, surely there must be a law hidden
away in the Constitution of Great America that authorises a “pre-emptive strike”,
a strike just as pre-emptive and just as deadly as that against Iraq in 2001.
Surely there must be because, weeks later, the police are still looking for that clause as
they let George Zimmerman prowl the street to save the young women and children
of America from the likes of Trayvon Martin.
Armed with a chocolate, talking to his girlfriend on his way
home from the shops, Trayvon must have represented the single greatest threat to American
civilization since Rosa Parks threatened to contaminate an entire bus filled
with whites. Black as he was, there was nothing good that he could have done;
nothing innocent about walking the street that fateful afternoon. We shall
never know, Trayvon lies in his grave, and perhaps the thought of him as an
eliminated threat shall allow Zimmerman to sleep better at night. Meanwhile I shall
sit here and continue to wish I had never heard his name because it all doesn’t
make any sense. In this world of Obama’s and Universal Declarations of Human Rights,
it just doesn’t fit in at all. I would be better off forgetting the name. The
problem is I can’t, and if it means anything to you to live in a world that is
free and fair and just; neither will you.
