The Tragedy of Trayvon Martin

The tragic shooting of Trayvon Martin is simmering with racial tension. The 17-year-old African American had been visiting friends at a home in a gated, Orlando-area community when he was pursued by a neighborhood watchman, got into a physical altercation, and was shot. As New York Times columnist Charles Blow describes the incident, “Trayvon had a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea. Zimmerman [the shooter] had a 9 millimeter handgun.”

Moments before, Zimmerman had called the police about the young man, describing him as “real suspicious.” The police had told him not to pursue. Zimmerman did anyway. Yesterday, Martin’s 16-year-old girlfriend came forward to say that she’d been on the phone with Martin when the confrontation began. “Someone’s following me,” he said. She told him to run, and he said he was just going to “walk fast.”

By all appearances, the shooting appears unprovoked, and yet the shooter is free and uncharged with any crime, protected by Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ law. As the Justice Department opens a query into the case, it appears that a national conversation about race is about to start yet again.

I recognize that I, as a middle class, protestant white man, am sort of an odd bird to comment on this. But I hope these few reflections might help us prayerfully and thoughtfully respond to the firestorm brewing in Florida.

There’s no doubt that African American men in their late teens and twenties occupy a complicated place in our culture. On the one hand, they are disproportionately likely to be stopped by police and convicted of crimes. Simultaneously, they are less likely to find jobs. These combine to create tremendous social and cultural pressures. Add to that the enduring legacy of slavery’s family-destroying effects: fatherlessness. The disrepair of the family unit in African American communities has perpetuated distrust of authority and a feeling of helplessness, and debate rages about how to help. (See, for instance, Bill Cosby’s Come On, People, and the critiques of Cosby and his allies by Michael Eric Dyson in Is Bill Cosby Right or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?)

Into that void come a host of dreams. The popular icons and role models for young black men reveal much about their hopes. It’s been said that the best way to a better life for young black men is to either become a sports icon or a thug, and the popularity of heroes like LeBron James and Jay-Z are demonstrative of that hope.

Jay-Z in particular seems to embody an ideal embraced by many. His songs revel in his years as a drug dealer and pimp while simultaneously lamenting the cost on his soul. He beats his chest, declaring, “I’m a multimillionaire, how is it I’m still the hardest n***** here?” (from “D.O.A.”) and elsewhere laments, “Lord forgive me, I never would have made it without sin.” (from “Free Mason”) This tension between criminal bravado and sinner’s lament is throughout his work, reflecting a sense of feeling trapped in a world where thug life was the only hope of a way out.

In “99 Problems” he satires an encounter with a police officer:

So I…pull over to the side of the road
I heard “Son do you know why I’m stoppin’ you for?”

Cause I’m young and I’m black and my hat’s real low?
Do I look like a mind reader sir, I don’t know
Am I under arrest or should I guess some mo’?

“Well you was doin fifty-five in a fifty-four
License and registration and step out of the car
Are you carryin’ a weapon on you I know a lot of you are”

I ain’t steppin out of [expletive deleted] all my paper’s legit

“Well, do you mind if I look round the car a little bit?”

Well my glove compartment is locked so are the trunk in the back
And I know my rights so you gon’ need a warrant for that

“Aren’t you sharp as a tack, you some type of lawyer or something’?”
Or somebody important or somethin’?”

Nah, I ain’t pass the bar but i know a little bit
Enough that you won’t illegally search my [expletive deleted]
“We’ll see how smart you are when the K9 come”

There’s something of a self-perpetuating reality at work here – suspicion of authority is treated by that authority as suspicious. Young black men are stereotyped as “scary” or “criminal”, and some – like Jay-Z - live into that stereotype.

Similarly, in the movie Crash, there’s a dialogue between Anthony and Peter, two black men on the streets of Los Angeles. As a white couple passes them on the sidewalk, the wife grips her husband’s arm tightly and presses in, fearfully pulling back from Anthony and Peter. Anthony is offended by her reaction:

Anthony: Look around! You couldn’t find a whiter, safer or better lit part of this city. But this white woman sees two black guys, who look like UCLA students, strolling down the sidewalk and her reaction is blind fear. I mean, look at us! Are we dressed like gang-bangers? Huh? No. Do we look threatening? No. Fact, if anybody should be scared around here, it’s us: We’re the only two black faces surrounded by a sea of over-caffeinated white people, patrolled by the triggerhappy LAPD. So you tell me, why aren’t we scared?
Peter: Because we have guns?
Anthony: You could be right.

If you’ve seen the movie, you know what comes next. Anthony and Peter pull guns, follow the couple down the street, and carjack them. They simultaneously are offended, even oppressed by the stereotype, and yet they live into it.

In his excellent novel, The Queen of Harlem, Brian Keith Jackson tells the story of Mason Randolph, a black, upper middle class college graduate who decides to spend a summer living in Harlem before going on to Stanford Law School. He wants to live out the cultural experience of African Americans that he was sheltered from by his wealthy, Southern parents.

In a revealing chapter, Mason finds himself in midtown with his credit cards cut off. Suddenly, he’s like any other young black man in New York, without his bottomless cash fund to whisk him off in a taxi. He doesn’t even have enough change for the subway. Dejected, he makes an exhausting journey on foot for dozens of blocks back to his apartment in Harlem, wrestling with this strange feeling of powerlessness. Simultaneously, he observes how others look at him – the fear in their eyes, the wide berth they give him on the sidewalk. He fantasizes about demanding someone’s wallet as he feels the power of fear hovering in the space between him and them.

These stereotypes aren’t just in films, fiction, and rap songs. They are real-life, day-to-day realities, a cultural perception that many argue shaped the way George Zimmerman reacted to young Trayvon as he walked back to his friend’s house that rainy evening. Had Trayvon been white, would Zimmerman have reacted with such suspicion? Would Trayvon, having been approached by Zimmerman, have reacted with such fear and distrust? There are deep cultural preconditions at work in this story, and the consequences are heartbreaking.

So how should Christians respond?

First, we should be moved to compassion. However we understand the background of this tragedy, let us never forget that a young man lost his life, and that a family lost a son. George Zimmerman will live the rest of his life knowing he killed a promising young man over a misunderstanding, and that too is tragic.

Second, we need to understand that the issues behind this story are cultural and institutional, and require a solution on the same scale. Many evangelicals tend to believe that the problem is an individual, isolated problem, requiring an individual, isolated solution. ‘We need the gospel to transform racist hearts.’ While that’s certainly true, it’s also not the whole picture. These realities run deep and call for deep culture shifts. As Anthony Bradley put it:

The revivalist impulse by many evangelicals rightly understands that ultimate social change comes when members of society become followers of Christ. However, American history has clearly proven that personal salvation does not stop people from being racists nor from setting up social institutions and policies that deny others access to the means of liberty and human dignity. If evangelism alone were effective for social change, Christians would never have participated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, been slave owners, created apartheid in South Africa, or allowed Jim Crow laws to come into existence.

Theologians like Abraham Kuyper remind us that, because of God’s common grace, evangelism is not necessary to persuade people to treat others with dignity and respect — after all, the law of God is written on the heart (Rom. 2:15) even though it merits them no favor with God. Therefore, work at both. We must morally form individuals and dismantle cultural norms of racism that become structural.

(Read the whole article here.)

It’s a complex and overwhelming picture, perhaps something that can only come out by prayer.

There have always been counter-examples (like Cosby) who have gone against the grain of the stereotypes. In recent years, role models like Tony Dungy and Barack Obama have used their high public profiles to elevate fatherhood and achievement. Voices like Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson have pounded the table to bring these issues into conversations at the highest levels of academia. Amongst evangelicals, we have a whole generation of young, brilliant leaders emerging - including amongst our young, restless, reformed crowd, like Anthony Carter, Anthony Bradley, Eric Mason, and many more. These men and countless others who break from the unfortunate stereotypes, in various places of leadership in our culture, are the best hope of transforming the “norm”, and that transformation is desperately needed, as this current tragedy reminds us.

Trayvon Martin’s death brings all of this back to the forefront because George Zimmerman, by all appearances, is not a vicious, racist, monster. Instead, both men appear to have played into broad cultural stereotypes with disastrous consequences for both – turning one into a killer and the other into a corpse. It’s a tragedy that should shake our consciences awake, bring us to our knees, and bring us together. May the God who reconciles all things in Jesus Christ, in whom there is no Jew or Gentile or Black or White, have mercy on us all.