As we collectively mourn for Trayvon Martin and feel outrage for him, his family and all people who live in fear of a criminal (in)justice system which is designed to entrap and persecute them or their loved ones, we must reflect on the dynamics of racism and fear in our culture that not only allowed, but encouraged, Travon’s murder. From the We Are Not Trayvon Martin tumblr:
The Trayvon Martin case isn’t about an isolated incident but about a pattern of behavior. It’s assumed that racism some how magically ended in the 1960’s. Instead, we’ve slapped a fresh coat of paint over it and then remarked about how great it looked. But the problems didn’t disappear.
And we must have a conversation about the System of White Supremacy and the white women jurors who released George Zimmerman. As one of our collective members posted earlier today on facebook, “White Supremacy let Zimmerman go, but it was a jury of almost all white women who did White Supremacy’s bidding.” The Daily Mail reports:
A jury of six women, five of them white and the other a minority, decided George Zimmerman was not guilty in the shooting of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin. Now, many are questioning how the all-female jury affected the outcome of the trial.
Why is this? Let’s be clear here. This had nothing to do with safety, with standing your ground (if it did, Marissa Alexander would not have gotten sentenced to 20 years for standing her ground), or with the hoodie he was wearing. It had to do with Trayvon Martin being black. As Angela Davis illuminates:
Trayvon’s blackness wasn’t something he could hide, so it wouldn’t have mattered whether he’d worn a hoodie or a t-shirt that fateful night. It mattered that he was black, and it mattered that the person who shot him had a vendetta out for black men before Trayvon ever set foot in the neighborhood. It matters that in 2012, there are more black men in prison today than those who were enslaved in 1850. It matters that blacks, in particular black men, are overrepresented in the criminal justice system and underrepresented in colleges… It matters that blacks are less likely than whites to abuse drugs, but more likely to be convicted of drug crimes. None of these statistics are due to a genetic predisposition to violence, poor health and underachievement, instead as a direct result of the disenfranchisement of blacks that has occurred in this country for more than 200 years at the hands of slavery, Jim Crow Laws, discrimination, and the institutionalized racism in our schools, banks, businesses, courts, and prisons that has torn apart our families and fractured our community. Just like Trayvon Martin, race mattered for Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Emmett Till, and hundreds more we will never know the name of who died because of their skin color.
And it had to do with most of us, and white women in particular, being socialized to fear blackness. In her article, “White Fear of Black Men,” Bonnie Berman Cushing explains:
History, psychology and media all play a significant role. The myth of the predatory Black man stands on the shoulders of centuries of stories and images shared from one generation to the next, sometimes directly and sometimes in coded messaging (such as admonishments to lock the car in certain neighborhoods or clutch your pocketbook closely on certain elevators and streets). Our collective fear of the Black man has a rich and detailed history, one that by this time has practically been encoded in our national DNA.
She continues by quoting M Gibson:
Fear of the black man didn’t just start overnight, and it didn’t just happen during the course of our lifetime; like any singularity it has to have a beginning. Its origin has been embedded in this nation’s consciousness since the Nat Turner revolt; a pathological fear that the oppressed will one day rise up and inflict vengeance upon the oppressor.
We live in a society that labels any black, brown or poor body that doesn’t completely assimilate into white cultural norms, behaviors and dress codes as a criminal. We live in a culture that has a double standard with regards to whose lives it values and whose lives it finds dispensable. And we live in a society that tells women that they are victims and should be afraid. Then pop culture, marketing and the right-wing and mainstream media do everything they can to perpetuate and profit off of these fears and stereotypes. 
You don’t have to look very far for examples of black men being shown as monsters and criminals and white women being portrayed as victims in need of rescue. The defense attorneys, along with every other mainstream force in this country, did everything it could to socialize those 6 women into being so afraid of Trayvon Martin that they would see Zimmerman as a hero, as the man that made their streets ‘safer.’ Even though “white people are five times more likely to be attacked by another white person than by a Black one and that two-thirds of the rapes committed in our country are by white men” (Cushing).
So what do we do as white people and as people socialized as white women? Are we going to remain complicit in a society that devalues the families and lives of people of color or are we willing to commit to doing something? Are we going to fight to change the values, laws and narratives of this society into something more just?
Each of us must decide our own step forward. We can start by taking leadership from people of color, and people of color led organizations who have been organizing for years to fight the racist criminal (in)justice system. We can talk with other white people and have difficult conversations with them. We can counter hostile and racist remarks through-out the media that are continuing to label the very non-violent protests of this verdict as violent mobs. This is our problem, our ancestors created this mess and we are perpetuating it with our inaction. We need see this fight as our fight, and not leave it solely up to the people most targeted by violence to solve this for us. White women can work to directly counter mythologies of themselves as victims and Black men as aggressors. Cushing offers this:
I understand I will have to check my racist assumptions and continue to unlearn the lessons I have inherited about Black men for the rest of my life. I will always need to remind myself I have been socialized to collectivize the violence of Black individuals and individualize the violence of whites. I will need to intentionally counteract that socialization. This is part of my legacy as a privileged white woman in the United States, and I take it on both sadly and gladly.
We must do something. We must learn to categorically reject what we are being taught. Because who knows which of us will be on that jury next. Or in whose name the next injustice will occur. Actually, we know. We know who will most likely be on the next jury, and we know who will most likely experience the next injustice and in whose name it will happen. Unless we do something.
(Thanks to Levana and Zara for adding to and editing this post.)
To add to these critical reflections, here is a strong piece by Dr. Stiletto on the intersection of race and gender in this injustice and way in which “white womanhood is manipulated like pieces of a worn out chessboard.” in the US.
http://thedrstiletto.com/2013/07/15/228/
Some excerpts that directly speak to the issues raised that I want to pull out in this context:
“…white folks, especially white women who feed into the games of oppression Olympics, need Black Feminist Thought. Actually, we know my sentiments are ever America needs intersectional studies on the systems of privilege and oppression that our institutional and intrapersonal realities in this society. But in light of this case, had the all female, predominantly white jury been keen on the strategies of white masculinity at the forefront of this trial, neither they nor America at large would have allowed themselves to be played in such a way for white women to walk away the “hero-victims” yet again. Juror B37 has already contracted to write a book on her just and civic duty rendered to society regarding “a boy of color.””…
…”The lack of critical engagement with dominant race and gender practices in the United States serve intersectionally as crucial elements for the failure of justice within our criminal injustice system. To ignore the intersectional systems of being and constructions is to halfheartedly address the matrices of oppression at the core of U.S. culture and society.
As a critical race and gender theorist, I perceive that these jurors never saw Trayvon Martin as their son, brother, or life partner; nor did they get past seeing the litigators and throngs of key defense witnesses as their trusted husbands, children, and friends. But even more telling, I would guarantee that they never saw Trayvon as themselves. This is the difference that black feminists have pointed out for decades regarding feminists thought in the United States. It is not that we consistently defend black manhood as endangered, but in the lived experiences of black men, we also identify the oppression that we too embody.
My tears at the rendering of this verdict were not just for black sons, nephews, uncles and life partners who are hunted and killed at random, but were for myself who like June Jordan wants at any given moment to be able to take a walk and not be the wrong color, the wrong sex, the wrong age, the wrong socio-economic status, just wrong.
The jurors’ inability to see themselves as Trayvon hinges on a number of white masculine strategies played out in that Sanford courtroom. Firstly, the win on the defense team that allowed Zimmerman’s domestic violence past to be excluded from evidence marred him from being viewed as a sex/gendered violent predator. Thus, his penchant for stalking was not constructed as a deranged man, but simply as a concerned neighbor, where sex and gender is cancelled out of the equation as this incident involved two males. Zimmerman’s violent character rooted in his construct of masculinity never entered into the courtroom—an epic fail on the prosecution.
Second, his defense of self-defense was not only constructed through racially coded rhetoric, but patriarchal rhetoric as the defender of the home and ultimately white womanhood. While a guest on MSNBC, Mychal Denzel Smith pointedly argued, though it was glossed over,
“They [the defense team] had no respect for Trayvon Martin to begin with,” Smith began. “The thing that disgusted me, the jury was made up of six women, five white women. The defense literally invoked the same justification for the killing of Trayvon Martin that you would during lynching.
“They showed a picture of George Zimmerman’s white woman neighbor,” he continued, referencing defense witness Olivia Bertalan, “and showed her as the picture of fear and said, ‘This is what the neighborhood was up against, and put a picture of Trayvon Martin with his shirt off, looking like the most thugged-out version of Trayvon Martin you could get, and basically said George Zimmerman was protecting, not just himself, but white womanhood from this vicious, black thug.”
Thank you Beja for this piece.
“We must learn to categorically reject what we are being taught. Because who knows which of us will be on that jury next. Or in whose name the next injustice will occur.”
This is truth but I wonder are white wimen even capable of such a social feat as a whole. As a black man I have learned that white women use that status as a victim to control black men via false rape accusations lying to police about being beat and the such and therefore I have openly chosen never to date white white women, convince other men of all non white races to do the same and also not socialize with them in any way on the intrest of preserving my freedom. Am I wrong for doing so? I tell my sons that to date a white woman is to commit social treason and slap the face of every black woman in their family. These are are not racist values these are survulival techniques that have kept me out of the judicial system and off of the police’s radar. I want my sons to enjoy freedom and I cannot see true freedom with a white woman involved in their lives.
thanks for sharing your truth. i think you are right that many women play out a dynamic called the virtuous victim narrative and other old narratives that can compromise the safety of people of color. and it’s bigger than that – it’s a perception/image created about white women in order to hold them literally and metaphorically captive/separate from black men. there are far more paths and pipelines to prison than through a relationship with a white woman. but i also think all people are capable of more than they are taught to be and more than they are conditioned to do. and i think individuals, who are committed to being anti-racist and anti-oppressive, can and do change the narratives that they play out in this world and create relationships that support transformation. but it’s always your prerogative to make your own choices about who you enter into relationship with and what values you pass along to your children about love, safety and survival.
more resources looking at white femaleness and this trial:
http://thefeministwire.com/2013/07/white-female-jurors-and-florida-justice/
http://feministing.com/2013/07/16/white-womanhood-protectionism-and-complicity-in-injustice-for-trayvon/