The Zimmerman Verdict
After George Zimmerman fatally shot and killed Trayvon
Martin, I was emotionally distraught.
The murder was complex, and it was a lot for me to process. My first thoughts were of my son, who
at the time was one. He could one
day be mistakenly seen as suspicious just for being a black male wearing a
hoodie and then be killed in cold blood for trying to defend himself and stand
his ground. It sickened me.
What compounded my sickness, fear, and disgust was the not
guilty verdict George Zimmerman received.
My initial thoughts were of my son, who was now two, my husband, my
brother, and the many men of my family.
They were all Trayvon Martin.
Secondly, I thought about my students, students who had no intentions of
doing harm but would be perceived as suspicious just for the color of their
skin. I had taught a countless number of Trayvon Martins.
That school year, I only taught one small group of seniors;
they were a class of 17. All but
one of those students had me as an English teacher for three out of their four
required English classes. Needless
to say, I knew them very well. In
this class, there were five African American male students. They were some of the most brilliant
students I’d ever taught. And so after the George Zimmerman verdict, I also
thought specifically of the five young men in that class. I sent them a message and offered my
ear if they needed it to help them process the verdict.
Invisibility
As a teacher who tried to cultivate social consciousness in
my students, we often talked about race and gender and how they intersected
with our past and our present.
That year alone, we read The
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a collection of poems from Nikki
Giovanni, and August Wilson’s Fences,
among other non-Afro-centric texts. After
the Zimmerman verdict, however, something became increasingly clear to me. The students I taught attended a
predominately black and brown high school that affirmed their identity,
history, and culture. Although, we needed to work on the brown
affirmation. Our school was a
place where students who looked like them were a part of both the honors and
non-honors courses. But when students left the cultural comfort of our
building, they entered a different world, and unfortunately, a world that still
denigrates black identities.
Further, I realized that while the students at my school
were reading books where people of color were the protagonists, where they were
dynamic characters, where they were heroic yet flawed at the same time, they
would leave the cultural security of our building to enter a world where other
students were solely reading texts such as The
Scarlet Letter, The Awakening,
“Beowulf,” or almost any Shakespearean play where people of color are either
invisible or insignificant at best.
For some people in America, it is possible for them to have never been
required to read a text where the protagonist or author was a person of color. I recently saw a presentation by Dr.
James Johnson, a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he shared that America is
more racially segregated today, than it was during Jim Crow. So not only is it possible for people
to attend schools where they are not required to read diverse texts, it is also
possible for people to go throughout their day to day lives without having an
authentic interaction with a person of color. These types of people do not have stories to counter or problematize
the popular stereotypical tropes of people of color, specifically black males,
portrayed in the media.
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