When I saw this piece by Aura Bogado, a former producer at FSRN, I decided to post it, not only because it’s well written, but because she didn’t hesitate to use the words “white supremacy.”
Here’s what she has to say: Throughout the trial, the media repeatedly referred to an “all-woman jury” in that Seminole County courtroom, adding that most of them were mothers. That is true—but so is that five of the six jurors were white, and that is profoundly significant for cases like this one. We also know that the lone juror of color was seen apparently wiping a tear during the prosecution’s rebuttal yesterday. But that tear didn’t ultimately convince her or the white people on that jury that Zimmerman was guilty of anything. Not guilty. Not after stalking, shooting and killing a black child, a child that the defense insultingly argued was “armed with concrete.” Read the rest of it here: Aura Bogado- The Nation
Although I can’t claim to have watched or read everything about the trial, the “stand your ground” law and the argument that Zimmerman was defending himself have been talked about countless times in the media. But there wasn’t too much said about why a kid like Trayvon Martin would confront the man stalking him. Somehow the fact that Martin courageously did “stand his ground” and “defend himself” was undercut by Zimmerman’s argument that he felt threatened, even though he was the one armed with a gun and in pursuit.
That’s one of the characteristics of white supremacy: the use of language to reverse things, create the illusion that white fear justifies homicide. It is a tragically American habit to fear and act preemptively. It’s seen in the centuries of campaigns of genocide against indigenous peoples and enslavement of Africans, in occupations and wars and drones…. Personally, I don’t believe there’s anything “new” about a guy like Zimmerman following a kid like Martin knowing full well he has the power of a concealed weapon.
George Zimmerman’s defenders in and out of the courtroom decried, both he and Martin profiled each other, suggesting that there was some kind of equality between Zimmerman’s suspicion of Martin, and Martin’s spot-on assessment of Zimmerman.
When Martin realized he was being followed by a grown man, he may have thought Zimmerman was a sexual predator– teenagers have a sense about these things. Martin told his friend on the phone that he was being followed by “a creepy-ass cracker,” which to me suggests something menacing and predatory was taking place.
Did Zimmerman call out and say, “Hey, do you live around here?” or “Hey, you look lost,” or “Hey, I know you don’t live around here, so you must be lost… can I help you?” No, he did not.
Martin knew he had two choices: either run or turn and confront the strange guy trailing him with his loot of candy and soda.
There’s a similar trial underway in Honolulu right now. It’s the trial of Christopher Deedy (Washington Post article), a federal agent accused of 2nd degree murder of a Hawaiian man, 23-year old Kollin Kealii Elderts. During an altercation that took place in the early morning hours at a Waikiki McDonalds, a fight broke out and Elderts reportedly yelled something about Deedy being “a fuckin’ haole.”
To say someone is haole is to use a Hawaiian word that describes that person as white — I refer to myself as hapa-haole because I am Hawaiian and haole. It’s the adjective or expletive in front of the world haole that describes the haole person’s nature. But now, in the 21st century, to call someone an effing haole during a fight can lead to being arrested and tried for a hate crime. Or as it turned out for Elderts, it led to being shot to death.
When the whiteness of someone, or rather the non-blackness or non-nativeness of someone is referenced, it comes across as racialized in a way that many people often have trouble understanding. It’s like having baggage that’s been circling a luggage carousel for a few centuries suddenly thrown at them. It should be no surprise when plenty white people don’t recognize that baggage as their own and, therefore, have no idea how to unpack it, or that they even should unpack it. Ignorance tends to code as innocence.
But when someone says something accusatory about a white person/haole, what they are typically referencing in an emotional way is something about power. Look at the language: “creepy-ass cracker;” however annoyed or defensive Martin was when he said it, he was saying there’s something “creepy,” as in scary, about this “cracker,” a word used to describe a white guy who whips slaves. When Elderts called Deedy “a fuckin’ haole” he was saying what a lot of Hawaiians (and even non-Hawaiian residents) think and sometimes say when confronted with a white person who literally has no sense of how inappropriate it is to behave in an entitled, invasive, superior way… especially in Hawaii.
It is insulting and psychologically undermining, and it is the height of how individual white people express, without hesitation, their personal white supremacy.
Whether consciously or unconsciously inferred or conferred by the centuries of history spinning around that carousel, my sense is that people with power, however small that power may be, typically don’t want to relinquish it.