Trayvon Martin: Another Senseless Victim of Racist Violence in America

As we are inundated with reports, commentaries and social media commentary regarding the senseless tragedy in Sanford, Florida where Trayvon Martin, a high school student from Miami, was gunned down by a white neighborhood crime watch member, my heart is burdened heavy with the realization that in some way, we are all responsible for this horror. Once again, I am forced to ask myself the self-damning question of why it had to come to this horrific tragedy for there to be outrage at a society that has failed to educate our young people so that they can successfully compete on the academic world stage while simultaneously being responsible for an environment in which the life of a young person of color is not as valued as a white person; a system with its roots in the three-fifths compromise that has allowed systemic racism and a culture of violence on both sides of the track to fester in our national psyche while creating a maelstrom of devastation across America.

God help us, but the story of Trayvon Martin is not a new story. The conditions that made it possible for Trayvon to be murdered have been in place throughout the history of our country with its murderous consequences eliminating Native Americans, gaining steam during the days of slavery and being energized in the basement of an Alabama Baptist church where the lives of four little black girls were violently snuffed out. Not long after that, two young white men who had the audacity to work with a young black man as they registered black citizens to register to vote in Mississippi were taken to a quarry, shot and buried there as if they were so much garbage.

The list is almost endless and now, in twenty-first century America, in addition to being home to the killing of Trayvon Martin, Florida has taken steps that threatens our democracy, fragile as it is, by legislating away the rights of Floridians who because of incarceration are now prohibited from earning a living, housing and voting. Florida has indeed shown compunction for denying African-Americans and other minorities who are already disproportionately shut out of the mainstream, to be additionally subjected to a kind of rabid racism reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. But, as one racially charged nightmare after another explodes across the national landscape, where is America’s unified outcry? Where are the sustained outpourings of justified anger towards those who would snuff out the life of another simply because of the color of their skin?

President Obama ran on a platform of change. How much has changed however when it is only acts of terror and tragedy visited upon our community such as the shooting of Trayvon Martin before we are willing to leave our television sets for a minute so that we can mobilize against the daily injustices and insults all people of color are forced to deal with. Celebrities like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson rush to the scene of the crime, galvanize us and then after they return home, we go back to business as usual, soon forgetting the cold, lifeless body lying on a sidewalk in a Florida city—or anywhere USA—until the next time when the cycle of righteous anger begins once again.

It is impossible for any fair-minded or thinking person to not wonder that if the racial roles were reversed in this horrific event, would law enforcement have allowed an African-American shooter to walk away from the scene of the crime after killing an unarmed white boy who, like Trayvon, was armed with nothing more than a can of iced tea and a bag of Skittles? Sadly and embarrassedly, racism in twenty-first century America still exists on a level that makes a role reversal of this shooting impossible to have the same outcome.

The real issue however, is that the time of categorizing incidents like this as simply “white versus black” must come to an end. We have an opportunity, both angered and emboldened by this senseless tragedy, to turn the discussion to what is right versus what is wrong. All of us, Americans of every color, heritage, faith, orientation, or even political persuasion, must come together with the realization that if we fail to unite ourselves in a righteous struggle against injustice, then we will continue to be a society that makes it possible for child killers and violent hate mongers to roam the streets of our communities—rural and urban—rendering the American dream an impossible dream.

We must not only remember Trayvon Martin the person, we must honor his memory. We have all seen enough tragedy to last a generation. The time to stop the violence is now. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.”