White Enough

Here's what I suspect about George Zimmerman: all his life, he wasn't white enough.

I heard a teen named Miles on youth radio today.  Funny, one of the reasons I liked the name Myles for my oldest son was because it didn't scream WASP.  Hearing this youth speak with my son's name illuminated the oceanic distance between their life experiences.  The Miles on the radio has had "the talk" with his mom and grandmother from the time he was small.  You know, the talk.  About what to do when approached by a police officer, how to put his hands out and speak clearly.  How to stay safe in a world where black and brown boys and youth and men are viewed as inherently suspect.  To state the obvious, I'll never have to have the talk with my Myles.

I am gutted over this week's news.  I wonder if the difference between me, as a white ally, and my friends of color is that I didn't see the not-guilty verdict coming, whereas none of them seemed truly surprised.  I was blind-sided.  I still imagine our country to be better than this.  And yet here we are.  Too many of my white, progressive friends seem silent.  There's a sense that because we don't truly know every detail of what went on that night, we can't get too specific in our judgments. 

Here's all I need to know:

1.  Trayvon Martin was an unarmed teen, walking home from the store with skittles in the pocket of his hoodie, talking to his friend on the phone.  (I also have learned that he was about to enter college on a scholarship, but that's beside the point.)
2.  George Zimmerman, neighborhood watchman, sees Trayvon and believes him to be suspicious.  He calls the cops, who tell him to back off, don't pursue the kid, don't get out of his car.
3.  George Zimmerman, armed with a gun, gets out of his car and pursues Trayvon.
4.  Some kind of altercation occurs.  Trayvon fights back like he was fighting for his life which, in fact, he was.
5. George shoots Trayvon and kills him.

Now, there are many other relevant details--like Zimmerman's history with racism, violence and law enforcement, like what Trayvon's friend heard on the phone that night, like the fact that Zimmerman wasn't drug tested and simply walked away from the scene of the crime.  But even without those other details, the basic five points above are more than enough.

A child is dead.

An unarmed child is dead.

A brown-skinned unarmed child is dead.  Again.

How can it not register in every mother's heart?  How can we not be absolutely crushed with grief over this event, made all the more tragic by the heavy layers of race, violence, and white privilege?

Stand Your Ground laws have enshrined racism into our justice system.  If it all comes down to a perception of threat, then the option of when and how to use gun-violence (legally, mind you) is completely subjective.  Zimmerman "felt" threatened.  Whether Martin was actually a threat to him is irrelevant, according to Stand Your Ground.  It's all about whether Zimmerman felt threatened, and he did, so violence was his right.  And yet when Martin was literally within moments of his death, he was said to have used the concrete sidewalk "like a weapon," thereby justifying Zimmerman's perceived threat.  Trayvon had no right to stand his own ground.  Stand Your Ground laws amplify the worst in us, and they are inherently unjust.  Lord have mercy, we've got to get rid of them.

The day after the verdict, there's George Zimmerman on Fox and friends, stating politely that he has no regrets.  That everything that he did was in God's plan.  He wouldn't do anything differently if he had it to do all over again.  I could be wrong, but I thought I saw surprise even in Hannity's eyes at that.  What Zimmerman articulated is a lethal theology.  He suggests that everything that happens is God's will, God's plan, and so everything that happens is as it should be.  To reduce this line of thinking to absurdity, does that mean that God willed the Holocaust?  Did God will my dad to die of cancer?  Does God dig the war in Syria and delight in refugees scuttling across the border into Turkey?  How can we assign the world's evil to God, and call it good?  I daresay this is an unexamined theology, a theology of excuses where we refuse to take responsibility for our own actions by assigning them instead to God.  Mixing up his own choices with God's, Zimmerman misses the deep irony in that.  But it shouldn't be lost by those who claim to follow in the ways of Jesus.

Here's what I suspect about George Zimmerman: all his life, he wasn't white enough.  His dad is white, and that's where he gets his WASPy name.  His mom is Latina.  His brother looks white, George looks Latino with his olive skin, dark eyes, and black hair.

In the construct that is white supremacy, one isn't simply born white.  You have to prove it, to choose it, to claim it.  That's what the "one drop" rule was all about...the ability to oust someone who could pass for white by uncovering just one drop of African blood coursing through their veins.  Anyone could be stripped of their whiteness, and the privileges that come with it, at any time.  To become white, we align ourselves with white family and white society...even when our childhood hearts detect the wrongness of discrimination, the evil of hatred.  That must be pushed aside to fully claim whiteness.  That may sound extreme if you're white and you've never really thought about it, but when I first heard this theory, I thought of my Grandmother.  My Grandmother was of a fierce spirit, hilarious and resilient, round and warm.  I loved my Grandmother with an undying love.  My Grandmother was one quarter Native American.  I don't know which tribe, all that was shameful and buried.  But of her 3 other siblings, she looked the most Native American.  She had jet-black hair, offset by clear blue eyes.  Her skin was a few shades darker than the rest.  And as I learned about her awful, difficult childhood, I learned that she was tormented by her white grandparents, taunted for being an Injun kid.  She was never white enough.  And while I can't draw a straight line from there to her racism, I believe that line is there.  I believe she always wanted her grand-kids to be white enough, so she threatened to disown my sister or me if we married a Black man.  (To which I remember my sister promptly responding "I'd disown you first!")

White racism never rests, as I heard someone say on the radio this evening.  It demands absolute allegiance.  Not just from George Zimmerman, but from the jury of white women, from white audiences in the privacy of our homes, from silent white onlookers chatting about other things on social media.  If we speak out, we risk the criticism of friends and family, the tension of claiming a side.  So we stay quiet and wait for the world to turn.

But a child is dead.

An unarmed child is dead.

A brown-skinned unarmed child is dead.  Again.

A mother's child is buried.  And as the Miles on youth radio struggles to figure out what this means for him, I realize I need to have "the talk" with my Myles after all.  It's the talk about how white supremacy/racism/privilege distorts our hearts and stunts our spiritual growth.  It's the talk about how hatred and violence cage us from the people we were each created to be--beloved children of God.  It's the talk about repentance and change.  Maybe it's the white kids who need the talk.