'Trayvon could have been me'

Wilberne Persaud, Guest Columnist

The New York Times Editorial Board commented on July 14, on Trayvon Martin's case before President Obama's belated, 'teleprompter-free' comments on what appeared to be a morally perverse, but predictable verdict.
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 They thought it might "not be possible to consider the case of George Zimmerman", acquitted of "all charges in the killing of Trayvon Martin, as anything but a sad commentary on the state of race relations and the battle over gun rights in America today."

They continued, "Certainly it is about race - ask any black man, up to and including President Obama, and he will tell you at least a few stories that sound eerily like what happened that rainy winter night in Sanford, Florida." Obama's subsequent assertion that he could have been Trayvon Martin 35 years ago demonstrates their point - forcefully. The black man's burden in today's world is heavy, though receding, admittedly at glacial speed.

Seemingly, it's a burden from time immemorial, with roots running deepest in the tributaries of colonialism and slavery. Focus on the so-called New World and you'd undoubtedly confront slave plantation society of North America, the Caribbean and Brazil. Focus on Trayvon Martin's deliberate killing by George Zimmerman, followed by his acquittal, takes you to uniqueness in North American slavery, the Jim Crow era, today's not-so-subtle racial profiling, preponderance of drug arrests and jailing of blacks as opposed to whites, whom the data show, use drugs at about the same rate.

Despite the recent Supreme Court ruling striking down important parts of the Voting Rights Act based on their view that "things have changed dramatically" in America, merely two hours after the ruling, Texas legislators moved to implement previously barred voter ID laws inimical to blacks among minorities. The unbiased know racism is very much alive and thriving in contemporary USA.

Racist groups

One subgroup in the country, however, lives in denial. They are, for the most part, generally white folk, particularly associated with the Republican Party and its Tea Party wing; southern 'Red States'; the Fox News apparatus unashamedly toiling as a Republican Party propaganda machine with scant regard for truth; and some prominent radio talk-show hosts. For this group, Obama's accession to the presidency, compounded by his convincing defeat of Mitt Romney to win a second term, mimic a red flag - even to a fallen Merrill Lynch bull.

Bill O'Reilly of Fox News speaks of 'race hustlers' playing and profiting from use of the 'race card'. In response to Obama's unscripted comments on the Trayvon Martin killing and George Zimmerman acquittal, he launches a tirade against blacks. He says, "About 73 per cent of all black babies are born out of wedlock. That drives poverty, and the lack of involved fathers leads to young boys growing up resentful and unsupervised and has nothing to do with slavery."

For O'Reilly, existing racial profiling, discrimination and the horrors of past enslavement contribute nothing to the condition of blacks in the US. The known facts of Trayvon Martin's brief existence - a caring father involved in his life, loving mother, and younger sibling for whom he was concerned - facts all contrary to his assertions about blacks in general, are irrelevant and unworthy of mention.

Important details

Trayvon Martin's death by the hand of an armed 'wannabe' cop previously instructed by police not to follow the young man is irrelevant too. So is Zimmerman's racial profiling exposed in the 911 conversation, even though as the eventual shooter, he complained "these fers always get away".

Black in America? You must be asking: What is it that drives white racists? Why is it that some white people hate you so? A difficult one to answer. To try, we must abandon O'Reilly's wish to chuck history out the window. Hundreds or thousands of strong, enslaved bodies at work on plantations with a planter, his family, overseers and a bookkeeper always meant huge risk - rebellion was on the planters' mind continuously, control was necessary.

It took several forms, including legislation mandating ratios of enslaved blacks to planters and other whites, harsh and immediate punishment for runaways and disobedience of the mildest form. Constant threat of, and immediate execution of, violent punishment sometimes whimsically determined, was the order of the day.

Punishments included beatings, burnings, shackling, whipping, mutilation, branding, solitary confinement and death, often by hanging. Indeed, some forms of punishment too indelicate for your family newspaper go unmentioned here. Rape and other forms of abuse were sometimes simply the means to assert the master's or overseer's dominance.

Enslaved blacks were property, chattel just like a horse - you don't recognise a family of horses. Horses end up where economic necessity dictates; similarly, there could be no enslaved family life as of right.

But how correct you are - those days are gone a couple of hundred years now. Psychologists, help us here. In order to inflict inhumane and horrific punishments devised to control enslaved blacks, it was necessary for white slave owners to dehumanise Africans. They had no pangs of conscience whipping a mule. If blacks were non-human, there could be no nightmares after meting out cruel and unusual punishment - torture.

This was easy to do. The physical characteristics of the two sets of humans were so different. Woolly hair, dark skin, broad nose, and thick lips - all these became to some degree a measure of non-humanness.

This need of the perpetrator to establish distance from the victim is real. Your columnist has actual, real-life experience of this. One evening, three young men carjacked and kidnapped me at gunpoint. Immediately, as they drove off, the apparent leader asked, "Weh di gun?" as he opened the glove compartment. "Is man like you gi we a hard time; 'ow much yuh pay for dis car?"

He was trying to make me the other, the exploiter, the enemy. I was thinking quickly and told a lie. It was the "company car, I am a struggling teacher, teaching poor people children. I have 500-plus marked examination scripts on the back seat, man, and I need you to take care of them."

This is a much longer story, but I hold strongly to the view that my discourse, my ability to stop them from defining me as 'different and the enemy', saved my life. My wife, on the other hand, says God had different plans for me.

So, yes, I go along with the insights of those who study the mind, that hypersensitive fear and hatred of black males in particular, among whites in the USA, is a remnant of the violent past of slavery and troubled history of race. President Johnson said in his 1965 State of the Union message that "the demand of Negro Americans for full recognition of their civil rights" would not be denied. Efforts, "no matter how savage and brutal, of some State and local governments to thwart the exercise of those rights is doomed".

He admitted that equal opportunity would not come in the near future without special efforts. And he gave two reasons for this. "First, the racist virus in the American bloodstream still afflicts us: Negroes will encounter serious personal prejudice for at least another generation. Second, three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment have taken their toll on the Negro people.

"The harsh fact is that as a group, at the present time, in terms of ability to win out in the competitions of American life, they are not equal to most of those groups with which they will be competing. Individually, Negro Americans reach the highest peaks of achievement. But collectively, in the spectrum of American ethnic and religious and regional groups, where some get plenty and some get none, where some send 80 per cent of their children to college and others pull them out of school at the eighth grade, Negroes are among the weakest."

Words still true

President Johnson's comments, sadly but realistically, in many respects, still describe contemporary America even though "things have changed dramatically!"

The New York Times Editorial Board said it well: Trayvon Martin was an unarmed boy walking home from the convenience store. If only Florida could give him back his life as easily as it is giving back George Zimmerman's gun."

Wilberne Persaud, an economist, currently works on impacts of technology change on business and society, including capital solutions for innovative Caribbean SMEs. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and wilbe65@yahoo.com