The Zimmerman verdict has become the latest flashpoint on race, proving if it needed proof that black/white race is still alive as a deep cultural as well as political problem.
On the one hand there's the moving yet shocking statement by the African American professor and TV pundit Melissa Harris Perry that she finds herself glad the child she's carrying isn't a boy, because black boys just aren't safe in this country. On the other, a white woman assaulted and injured an older black man--a veteran soul singer--for dedicating a song to Trayvon Martin. Demonstrations, with some violence attached, against the verdict, but also people on the side that won are incensed that charges were even brought, screaming their race-crazed conspiracy theories.
Here the trial itself is analyzed--one of the better of many analyses--and here the racial background that fills in the numbers revealing scandalous and persistent racial injustice. News to all others perhaps, but not to African Americans.
One response--and one that is likely to grow--is Stevie Wonder announcing that he will boycott Florida and all states that have the racialized stand your ground gun law. (And as someone pointed out, why isn't the NRA claiming that it all could have been avoided if Trayvon Martin had carried a gun?) Here by the way is a very good meditation on the real core question: exactly what should Trayvon Martin have done? It reveals what a sick verdict it is.
All of this is happening in the shadow of the Supreme Court's stripping the Voting Rights Act and just before the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington--two topics the great Louis Menard brings together.
Also just after President Obama's trip to Africa, where he visited a disembarkation point for black slaves on their way to America in chains.
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