This post was updated on August 7 at 1:58pm.
This post was written by Maranda C. Ward, a pre-doctoral candidate in the Graduate School of Education and Human Development.
As a young black female, my collective lived experiences have been colored – literally and metaphorically. The fluidities of race, gender, class, sex and education are part of my everyday life. The show up in insults disguised as compliments that qualify my grammar as “articulate,” and in the nightly news pitches stories about “those people.”
And recently, I’ve taken time to reflect on the George Zimmerman trial and its racial implications.
Did I know Trayvon Martin? I happen to have grown up with hundreds of Trayvons. I dated them. I babysat them. They served in my community-based youth development program and they sit next to me on the metro.
Questions asking what race had to do with the death of Trayvon Martin flood social media feeds. But let’s first consider what race had to do with the 1965 Moynihan Report, the crack epidemic, the Down Low phenomenon, the school-to-prison pipeline, the Dave Chappelle series or gangster rap. These cases, and countless others, are connected by the selectively pathologized profile of what it means to be black in America.
This selective image stems from racist and monolithic perceptions of the black man as a menace, a threat, a delinquent and a social ill that must be corrected, feared and pitted against the black woman, the family, the community and the dominant culture in America. This idea will forever be associated with the image of a hooded Trayvon Martin. In the trial, race was most definitely implicated.
I do not mean to just share racial ideologies, but to encourage collective, critical and unapologetic discussion about what we have learned from all the Trayvons – those that never make headlines or have the masses marching with rage, hope and remembrance.
Such thinking requires a new, open and educated view of the world. This is where you and I come in.
The acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of Trayvon Martin generated a public outcry both on and offline. It would be a disservice to the justice sought for Trayvon Martin (and all the other Trayvons) to allow that momentum to die. At this University, panel discussions, forums and workshops are a good start for any student group or academic department to consider.
We must also commit to fighting injustice systematically by integrating it in the mission statements and policies of our affinity groups and academic programs. It is this long-term effort that creates the ethos for our classrooms and interactions.
I charge us as students, scholars, researchers, administrators, friends and citizens to use the Trayvon Martin case as a way to incite public dialogue—raising meaningful questions that often go unasked. Will we finally learn from Trayvon Martin the things we should have learned from past Trayvons? Will we recognize the dangers of stereotypes, or the inequities in the judicial system? Do we see the power of mobilizing communities?
It could be all or none of these. The public dialogues that we begin will only tell.
