Trayvon Martin: Is White America Capable of Empathy?

The plight of black America is a long story involving hundreds of years of mistreatment that I am not capable of fully describing (read this). What the Zimmerman verdict shows, is the inability of many anglo-Americans to experience a little thing we call empathy.

There is an insidious vein that simply believes blacks folks are mentally inferior or particularly violent and sexualized. Media often perpetuates these stereotypes.

Poverty. Whites have a 300+ year head start in accumulation of wealth. Most wealth is passed down in the form of real estate, and blacks weren’t able to own property for much of our history. Property values are (ridiculously) diminished by the mere presence of blacks, who happen to have enough resources to live there (and lower property values means less money for schools). It takes a job to afford a house of course, and blacks are disproportionally unemployed. It’s tough to get a job without an education of course, and blacks earn far fewer degrees in US colleges with few minority faculty. A white felon is still as likely as a black man to be hired. Black kids are expelled from schools far more often than whites, and increasingly, breaking school rules leads to jailing.

We’ve allowed the privatization of prisons, which in turn contribute to think tanks and politicians who author and pass legislation which ensures that the beds in prisons will be filled, and that resources for inmates will be seemingly nonexistent. We’ve shunned rehabilitation in favor of isolation and institutionalism. We’ve cut access to education in prisons, we shame inmates. We often won’t hire them or let them vote when they get out. Recidivism simply means repeat customers to the prison industrial complex.

We’ve utilized the War on Drugs as a tool to propagate the mass-incarceration of black men, who use and sell drugs at commensurate rates to whites. Blacks are 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites, representing 37% arrested for overall drug use, and 59% in state prisons for drug offenses (which shows the racial disparity in sentencing). In 1980, 40,000 Americans were locked up for drug offenses, compared to 500,000 in 2012.

We’re Number 1! In caging our own people. The US represents 5% of the world’s populations, yet 25% of the incarcerated. And we get people in the system as soon as possible, thus our school to prison pipeline –
“Nationwide, African-Americans represent 15% of the population, 26% of juvenile arrests, 44% of youth who are detained, 46% of the youth who are judicially waived to criminal court, and 58% of the youth admitted to state prisons.”

Black on black crime. Everyone (save Native Americans) are victimized by their own ethnicity most often. This is not at all unique to the black community . Straw-man argument. Simple as that.

Leading up to the Zimmerman verdict, every conservative media outlet was predicting mass race-riots across the country if found not guilty. Profiling the entire black community the same way Zimmerman had done to Trayvon Martin that fateful night in February.

So this goes out to all of the ignoracists who don’t see themselves as prejudiced, who may have black friends at work and might hold the door open for elderly black folk. White privilege is being ignorant of the things you don’t have to deal with. To be ignorant or the institutional inequity inherent in America. To conveniently forget about hundreds of years oppression and suppression that persists today with thinly-veiled, carefully worded, seemingly-innocuous policy and practice.

7/31/13