I Am Trayvon Martin

An African American student who is a friend of a friend of mine wrote on his Facebook wall that he was shocked by the Trayvon Martin verdict (see my previous blog here). Someone responded:

"Don't take this to heart. You are a very smart, very talented, handsome guy, don't let yourself be dragged into this mentality. You are not going to be shot- you carry yourself well, speak well, walk and dress well. Martin was not killed because of the color of his skin, he was killed because he got into a very violent altercation with an armed man...Martin, RIP, had pictures of marihuana (sic) in his cellphone, texts about buying a gun illegally, and lots of racist profanity against white Americans. This was not about race. I'm telling you because you are new to this country and while its true that there is racism out there, this case wasn't it....You're a smart, educated, good looking guy. Believe me, you're not Martin."

There is something fundamentally sad, something fundamentally wrong about this. Something that struck me to the core with an anger that felt almost powerless against such passive discrimination. It is a discrimination so silent, so cloaked in politeness you almost get hoodwinked by its seeming logic and tell yourself that all is well. But then the questions hits you: are people who carry images of marijuana in their phones supposed to be shot? Should we be shot for the content of our Whatsapp messages? Once those questions start coming in, the floodgates open: am I supposed to be safe because of the way I dress? If I dress like a "thug", should I be shot on sight? Is what a wear, an indicator of who I am? Are the lives of those who buy their clothes from Fifth Avenue in New York, Sandton City in Johannesburg or Sam Levy Village in Harare more valuable than those whose clothes are from the corner thrift shop?

"You are not going to be shot - you carry yourself well, speak well, walk and dress well...." Whites can carry and talk whichever way they want to but if a black person carries himself well, then he is safe. What does this imply for those who don't? Let's not fool ourselves. This is about race. This is about discrimination, about the snap judgements of those who see the world as simply black and white, good and bad, they who subscribe to Cersei Lannister's motto: "Everyone who isn't us is an enemy". Certainly George Zimmerman revealed as much in his call to Emergency Services, "...they always get away", he complained. Who is 'they' we might ask?

I talk well. I like to think I dress well and I carry myself well. I learn at one of Europe's best schools, so supposedly I am safe right? Wrong. I have been a Trayvon Martin so many times it hurts. In Algeria where I would be the only one made to get off the bus and unpack my baggage to be inspected at police roadblocks. One officer went so far as to taste my toothpaste. The fact that I was the only black on the bus does not seem that much of a coincidence. In university where my professors would call me "l'africain" instead of ever trying to learn my proper name.

In Germany where I was the only black on a flight filled with Europeans and Arabs, where I was pulled out of the queue at boarding and put in a little room and interrogated, my hand luggage searched, my laptop scanned and my passport stamps and visa's examined in great detail.

In South Africa where I was helping my cousin shop for her wedding dress and the white owners of the shop completely ignored us for twenty minutes but went running to a white couple who had just come in to ask the price of a necklace. At the South African Post Office where the white manager told me I was "a problem" and that I should go back home instead of trying to open a bank account with my "fake" passport.

But closest to home, the day I was approached by one of our white neighbours who lived in the complex where my parents live. In all my innocence, dressed well, speaking well, carrying myself well, she approached me and asked me what I was looking for there. Who cares that I had unlocked the gate with my security code, that I had actually had a conversation with her a few months earlier when I happened to meet her in the garden; no, no one cares. To her I was suspicious just for being there. I didn't belong there.

I didn't belong there in much the same way Trayvon Martin did not belong there that fateful evening. I looked strange for being as normal as I could possibly be, in much the same way Trayvon Martin looked strange for walking home slowly from the shops talking on his phone to his friend. I was guilty of something in much the same way Trayvon Martin was guilty of carrying images of marijuanna on his phone. Something just had to be wrong. Something just had to not click. So she came up to me and asked me what I was doing there.

We are all Trayvon Martin's. We are all judged and told we do not belong every time we walk into a shop and security starts surreptitiously following us around. Every time one of us gets shot for being afraid of the big Hispanic man following him in the dark night. Which one of us would not stand their ground? Trayvon Martin did. And George Zimmerman decided he didn't belong not only in that neighbourhood. But on this earth. And the jury agreed.

RIP Trayvon Martin.

"What is really injured, bruised, if you will, is the psyche of our national population. We are all harmed. We are all belittled, and we give to the rest of the world more ammunition to sneer at us." - Maya Angelou speaking on the Trayvon Martin verdict.

Rest In Peace Trayvon; I no longer can

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 26^th 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.

#RIPTreyvon