Dropping the N-Bomb

Riley Cooper says he does not understand how he allowed himself to yell the "N word" at a black security guard at a country music concert. His apologies sound sincere to me, and his confusion real. At least one teammate has said that Cooper was not an obvious candidate for dropping the bomb, and that he had been a reasonably good teammate to that point.

At least Cooper himself recognizes that we do not live in a "post-racial" world. In the wake of the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of an unarmed young black kid, African-Americans are a little raw. As they see it, had the roles been reversed, Trayvon Martin would be in jail right now. They have reason to believe so, since Marissa Alexander was sentenced to 20 years in prison for firing warning shots at her husband; a black woman is not permitted to stand her ground, I guess.

As I begin to plan for the teaching of Huckleberry Finn this fall, this storm is instructive. The word has power, even with a black man in the White House. It conjures not distant memories but current injustices, and is not easily to be dismissed.

A column published on Foxnews.com (but without an obvious author, strangely enough) had this to say about the furor:

Since I'm not a African American, I don't feel comfortable telling a race of people to ignore an issue they might feel passionate about. What I am able to say unequivocally is that a word only has power if you allow it to have power and we as a society have given the word Cooper used far too much potency and authority during a time of substantial progress in race relations.

Whoever this author is, he is entirely right. But it's not the African-American community that has imbued the word with so much power. It is the pervasively racist society in which we live; it's the violence against young black men and women going back centuries; it's the indignities even the President of the United States must endure because of the racial label with which he lives. 

The "substantial progress" is real, but let's not forget who we really are and have been.

What Does the Zimmerman Trial Say About Race in the Judicial System?

One of the jurors in George Zimmerman's trial in the death of Trayvon Martin has begun to talk to media outlets, less than a week after the non-guilty verdict was announced. One of the members of the all-female jury, who says she and her husband own gun permits, did not think that race played a part in the shooting or in the jury deliberations. In an interview with CNN, Juror B37 said "Anybody would think anybody walking down the road, stopping and turning and looking -- if that's exactly what happened -- is suspicious," she said. "I think all of us thought race did not play a role," the juror said . "We never had that discussion." She also said that if the person acting and dressed in that way were "white or Spanish or Asian," Zimmerman would have reached the same alarmed conclusion he did because he "just got displaced by the vandalism in the neighborhoods, and wanting to catch these people so badly that he went above and beyond what he really should have done."

I have no doubt that Juror B37 is sincere in her claims that she did not consider race, but I think she may also be mistaken. An young Korean man walking down Zimmerman's street would not have aroused the same emotions as Trayvon Martin did, and that was not Trayvon Martin's fault. Young black men scare people because of the long tortured history of racist depictions of African-Americans in almost every element of our culture. Zimmerman probably did overreact to Martin because he is a product of his time and place. And Juror B37 considers that reaction to be perfectly reasonable because she is a product of the same time and place.

To that extent, the judicial system is infused with racism. It's a problem. But I don't think it's right to say that Zimmerman's trial was unfair. I believe the jurors acted in good faith and with minds as open as they could be. I do not believe the jury was rigged.

According to Juror B37, another juror, who wanted to convict Zimmerman of manslaughter, wanted to take into consideration all of his actions leading up to the confrontation with Martin, but did not believe that she was permitted to do so under the judges instructions. This is an interesting point. At what moment did Zimmerman take action that led to Martin's death. In the popular conception, his actions began as soon as he called the local police and was told to stop following Martin. But under the law, at least in Florida as interpreted by Debra Nelson, the relevant events began with the confrontation itself.

It seems to me that this is the mistake made by the prosecutors. At least in retrospect, prosecutors overcharged the case and should have spent a lot more time trying to show that Zimmerman was culpable for Martin's death because of a series of overzealous and foolish acts.