To George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin was never just a teenager who could possibly have belonged in the Sanford, Fla., gated community. He was always the “suspect.”
I’m not putting words into the mouth of the neighborhood watch volunteer who shot and killed Martin and was found not guilty on Saturday. That’s exactly what Zimmerman called Martin in his post-shooting statement to police, though the 17-year-old wasn’t a suspect in any crime. Martin was walking from the store to his father’s house. Zimmerman was armed with a gun and Martin with candy, and then Martin was dead, unable to tell his side of the story.
That’s when the narrative took over, the subtle but very real judgment that makes people clutch their purse closer or cross the street when young black men stroll by, that makes New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, with his city’s police department stop-and-frisk policies being challenged as discriminatory in court, feel comfortable saying, as he did recently, “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.”
It’s why comments after the Zimmerman verdict mention Chicago teens killing one another and O.J. Simpson. What happened in Sanford, Fla., wasn’t about any of that. But it was, in a way, about all of that, feelings so ingrained we might not even know they are there.
