Why Do Black and White Americans See the Zimmerman Verdict So Differently?

For many black Americans, the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case is beyond shocking, it is earth shattering. It is beyond disappointing, it is devastating. It is beyond unfair, it is unconscionable.

To many white Americans, justice was served last night. Based on media interviews, social-media posts, and dialogue around coffee tables and in restaurants last night as posted on Facebook and Twitter, many white Americans believe that George Zimmerman was protecting his community the night he singled out Trayvon Martin as “suspicious,” and ultimately defending his life from an alleged violent and vicious physical attack against his person by the 17-year-old unarmed Trayvon Martin.

The stark contrast, yet again of how black and white people simply do not view the prism of race and racism the same, is troubling. It troubles me how we can intermarry black and white, we can work in the same workplaces, we can date across racial lines, our kids can play together, sleep over, and we socialize together, and even worship together. So how can we be so far apart, time and time again when it comes to how we see race or don’t see race as a factor in our everyday decisions, in our culture, and even in our criminal justice system?

Last night’s nearly all-white, all-female jury's verdict to acquit George Zimmerman of not just a “murder 2 charge,” but of a lesser “manslaughter” charge, is simply devastating. It is devastating to Trayvon Martin’s family. It is devastating to the black community. And it is devastating to a nation that proclaims to be a place where a 17-year-old, unarmed black boy walking home from the grocery store does not have to fear being shot dead by an armed neighborhood “watchman” who has racially profiled him, and deems him an “asshole” who must not be allowed to get away.  We as a nation really need to stop with all of the emotion and all of the race baiting and we need to actually look at the facts of what happened in this case.

For me as an attorney, I am deeply concerned about how this case was prosecuted from the very beginning. The fact is that George Zimmerman shot and killed an unarmed 17-year-old black boy, who was doing nothing but walking home with some candy and tea. The fact that George Zimmerman pursued this young teen, scuffled with him, and ultimately shot him, proclaiming self-defense, and was not even arrested the night of the murder by authorities should jolt all Americans as to the true racial subtext of this case. The fact that George Zimmerman’s brother Robert took to CNN’s Piers Morgan last night and called Trayvon Martin “angry,” “violent,” wanting to possess a “gun” and a user of “drugs” and as such ultimately responsible for his own death actually reduced many of us to tears. The case was riddled with race from the very beginning. To deny that is dishonest and simply not the truth.
Sophia A. Nelson         

This case reminds me of the nation’s racially split reaction when Harvard Professor Henry “Skip” Gates was arrested in his own home by a white Cambridge police officer for being a suspected intruder in July 2009. The first black president, Barack Obama, spoke up, and he was attacked. He spoke up because he had a unique prism of understanding like no other U.S. president before him about what it feels like to be black, male, and racially profiled in America.

i know the feeling of what its like to be profiled. fortunately it didnt lead to murder.

For my fellow Americans who are Caucasian, I do not fault you for not knowing what it is like to be a black man or woman in America. How can you? What I fault is a system of institutional and generational white privilege and white-run jurisprudence in America that contends that a black boy’s life is so “valueless” that his admitted assailant is not even arrested the night he lay on the grass dead. I fault an attitude that supports the use of racial profiling against black males and others who are perceived as “different” or as would be thieves, murderers, or thugs. I fault a judicial system in Florida that sentences a black woman, Marissa Alexander, to 20 years for shooting her gun “off” at an abusive boyfriend who beat her, and yet allows a Hispanic male, George Zimmerman, to walk free for the murder of an unarmed black teenager