Conservatives' Twisted, Racist Logic in the Trayvon Martin Case

This is a counter-intuitive dynamic: just because a given group may constitute a higher percentage of those in jail, it does not in fact mean that a given individual is more likely to commit said type of crime.

A person is more likely to suffer a violent crime at the hands of a family member, friend, or acquaintance than a stranger; and most crime is intraracial.

Ultimately, incarceration is a function of many structural factors in relation to the criminal justice system.

Anecdotes matter. Police often give a pass to those they know or trust. The white kid with weed just made a mistake; the black or Latino is a hardcore thug to be jailed. The judge may give parole or a lenient sentence to a white defendant in order to “teach him a lesson” about bad behavior. By comparison, a person of color before the same judge is already a “lost cause,” someone to throw the book at. We see this same dynamic even in schools; researchers have determined that white and black youth who are accused of the same offenses see wildly different outcomes in terms of punishment. The latter are suspended or expelled, while the former are given warnings or other remediation.

Two points are readily apparent.

The demographics of those in jails, prisons and hospitals are a means of judging a society, as well as determining which groups of people are valued (and those who are not). By that calculus, the poor working classes, and people of color are second-class citizens in the United States.

If American history’s circumstances were reversed along the axis of the color line, then our country’s jails and prisons would be filled with millions of white people. In the sum total of this alternate American history there would likely have been many thousands of white people killed at the hands of black mobs and bloodthirsty vigilantes obsessed with maintaining the racial order, and protecting themselves from white “criminals” and “thugs.” In this world, there would likely have been many black George Zimmermans and white Trayvon Martins.

Here is the true failure of political imagination and empathy in the present: many white conservatives instinctively defend George Zimmerman because they cannot imagine themselves, their kin or their children as victims of unjust violence at the hands of the police.

Sadly, the consequence is an inability to find a sense of shared humanity with Trayvon Martin, because to do so would require a leap of faith in the pursuit of shared humanity and the common good across lines of race and class–a journey that many white conservatives and others are unwilling to entertain even in the 21st century.