By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California–The problem is not what we know; it’s what we feel. We do not really know what happened: for the vast majority of us, it happened somewhere else (in the previously unknown town of Sanford, Fla.), we have relied entirely on the cloying media with its pundits and professional oracles, unreliable 911 tapes, and a dearth of hard witnesses. We are detained by the jury system and all its variables.
We are castigated and moved by the articulate parents and their indescribable woe; they themselves (as filtered through the video imagery) appeared to have put off the requisite grieving process and instead were winged through their trauma on the strength of the previously suppressed racial anger and cynicism that now is sadly rampant in Obama’s America.
This America has a Congress that repeals the key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a Florida that sanctions armed vigilantism, and a Texas that passes medieval reproductive rights laws.
We did not particularly believe the Sanford police, given the historical track record of Southern police on such cases, and especially given the apparently forced removal of the Sanford police chief in the aftermath of the incident.
And let’s face it: we didn’t like George Zimmerman. The pulse of this longtime racially-stricken nation afflicts us both ways. Zimmerman, now curiously free, given the fact that he indisputably fired a gunshot at point-blank range into the unarmed body of a teenager, raises a separate set of racial shackles: he is of mixed Hispanic and Caucasian ethnicity; he apparently has a history of rabid racism and sexual misbehavior. He didn’t seem to have to work hard to walk away from his violence.
Many of us who are not Florida residents are aghast that he was enabled by a “Stand Your Ground” law that is uniquely bizarre and is putting police-sanctioned weapons into the hands of social misanthropes.
Moreover, the roundtable discussion of this horrific incident (thick-necked citizen watchman with a previous record of overzealousness and a significant lack of sophistication, called off from pursuing the hooded black kid who’s packing some candy and absolutely no heat, nonetheless fires his weapon at the young man) only raises the temperature of our social affliction with, by, and because of race. On one side, the police mysteriously refrained from even bringing the shooter in for actual questioning (or even protective custody, given his declared “fears for his life”.)
On the other side of this bloody calamity emerges a so-called New Panther movement, its spokespersons reviving the worst elements of 1960s-style cultural intimidation, calling this country “the United Snakes of America.” Black people are America’s Hebrews; they don’t need any subversives co-opting this kind of tragedy or grandstanding for the media while black kids are being slaughtered from Los Angeles to Chicago to Tallahassee.
President Obama, himself the target of inflammatory racial derision, both overt and subliminal, a man of dignity and rationality, an unassuming paragon of fatherhood and fidelity, touched many hearts when he first declared: “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin.”
The humanization of an unfortunate young man, caught in the nocturnal web of American angst, is worth more than any police audio tapes or second-guessing about what was clearly a brutal reminder: we elected a black president, but we haven’t selected a colorblind society.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in Encinitas, California. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com