One of the most covered news events of this semester was the killing of the 17-year-old black teenager Trayvon Martin by 28-year-old George Zimmerman. Though it has not been proven that Zimmerman’s actions were racially motivated, the case garnered national attention and prompted a public discussion on the shape racism takes in America today.
This case was particularly interesting to me in light of a play I was reading for one of my classes. The play, “Blues for Mister Charlie” by James Baldwin, is a fictional retelling of the murder of Emmitt Till, a black teenager from Chicago who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 for supposedly flirting with a white woman.
Till’s murder caused a national outrage, much like the murder of Martin, and both events brought the nation into a discussion of racism in America.
As part of this dialogue, Touré, author of “Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness,” wrote an article in Time Magazine called “How to talk to young black boys about Trayvon Martin: talking points about the potentially fatal condition of being black.” The article gives black boys a small guidebook for navigating a societal climate in which they are often looked at as threatening.
The article is disheartening to read, especially if you have lived under the assumption that “real” racism is a thing of the past. I have treated cases like the Till case as gruesome relics of a by-gone era, something that doesn’t happen in a time when we have a black first family.
Nothing disturbs me more than realizing that remnants of our racist past still exist and affect American citizens’ lives. One only needs to look at prison and poverty statistics to realize that there are very deep, racist structures in America that have not been resolved.
Whether or not the Martin case was racially motivated, it has caused Americans (including myself) to reflect on the very real ways in which minorities encounter racism every day.
This realization of the realities of racism still present in America should be a catalyst for all Americans to continue looking for solutions to problems facing our minority communities, and also a call for compassion in addressing those communities.