Trayvon Martin’s murder

A 17-year old African American, child of divorce, was walking to his father’s house after taking a half time break in a ballgame to get some candy at a local store.  He was wearing a hoody in a gated community in which his father had a house. He was unarmed. An armed man, a sort of self-styled neighborhood-watch vigilante, confronted the youngster out of the blue, with no plausible provocation and shoots him dead. 

All the rest of what happened that night is a tangle of interpretations, justifications, obfuscations., and a lawyer’s bag of tricks. We do know that the shooter shot the young man and that he is dead. We know the jury somehow concluded that Trayvon Martin was the aggressor for taking a half time break and going for some candy. The shooter didn’t scare himself to death, he scared Trayvon Martin to his death.

We do know that Trayvon Martin’s family will never recover.  They have lost their son twice. Once to a bullet and once to the Florida court system.

And now we know that his killer has been found not guilty of killing him.

Anne Coulter, the stand-up comedian turned conservative hitman and arch American polarizer, tweets “hallelujah” at the verdict.

As an American, I can hardly breathe from grief and nausea.

In New Mexico this March, an African American exchange student from the University of California – Santa Cruz, found a racist note on the door to his room in a UNM dorm.  It was the drawing of a stick figure with a noose around its neck and the word “N…..r,” the New Mexico Daily Lobo reports.

The student, Dominic Calhoun is majoring in Africana studies. He told the Lobo “I couldn’t understand why anyone would commit such a heinous act, especially on a college campus. Seeing the image made me disgusted by this city and campus. The fact that people think it is funny to draw offensive images is intolerable in all aspects.”

As a UNM Alumnus, it leaves me sickened, enraged, and in despair.

UNM Provost Chaouki Abdullah wrote in his weekly email to the UNM community that he was “saddened and angered that any of us is made to feel unwelcome or unsafe.”  The university said it was marshaling its forces to combat such abuse.

On a broader scale, members of the African American community in Albuquerque earlier brought a federal civil rights suit against UNM for long term racist policies directed at African American professors and students, a charge UNM denies. We’ll watch that case closely.

The simple law of social justice tells us that when anyone is the victim of prejudice, for whatever reason, all of us are victims.  The deep conscience in us all has made this clear over and over again. Hate in all its forms is as virulent as the plague. No one is safe from it once it’s let loose.

Hate creates paranoia. People with guns, ill trained, imbued with internal terrors spawned by bigotry, kill people, innocent people, with those guns.
We know this.

There’s much more to be said in the future about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, about guns, their principle purpose of killing people, and about paranoia and the scourge of racism in America, about propaganda and the purposeful creation of a politics of hate and creating phantom enemies to spur the sale of guns.

For the moment, it’s hard not to draw the analogy between Trayvon Martin, blamed basically for his own murder because he was an African American, and all the women in history who’ve been blamed for being raped because they were women.

For the moment, as hard as it is to practice restraint, even mere verbal restraint, we must look to the eloquence and vast wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr.

He wrote in his letter from the Birmingham City Jail in l963, “We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability.” Progress comes “through tireless efforts and persistent work.” And without this “hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.”

“We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.”




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V.B. Price

V.B. Price is editor and co-founder of New Mexico Mercury. He is the former editor of Century Magazine and New Mexico Magazine, former city editor of the New Mexico Independent, and long-time columnist for the late Albuquerque Tribune. His latest book is The Orphaned Land: New Mexico’s Environment Since the Manhattan Project. He retired as the editor of the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series at UNM Press in 2010. He has taught in the UNM Honors Program since l986.

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