From Resignation to Anger

The murder of Treyvon Martin has hurt every one of us in some way. Maybe we don’t all experience the depth of that pain today, but it has hurt each of us and it will continue to do so.

This murder was a symptom of the underlying condition of racism our society lives with every single day. Overt, subconscious, or institutional, racism is a disease that affects every part of the way our society functions.

I’m white. My sons are white. My husband is white. My brothers, father, and cousins are white. I will never know what it’s like to train my children to live under the constant fear of unprovoked violence from community members or authority figures. That is a tiny sliver of the unearned privilege my sons have to look forward to in this country.

I have heard, watched, and listened to many reports and perspectives on the Treyvon Martin case.  However, I was most deeply impacted by one written by Michel Martin titled “Treyvon Martin Was Afraid, Too.”

When I read this article, I felt like I was in one of those time-warp movie montages in which the character is transported to a different place and time. I was smack-dab in the middle of downtown Cincinnati in Fall 2001. I stood looking out the window of my third floor office adjacent to the Hamilton County Courthouse as police officers surrounded the courthouse. I watched those officers pull on their Kevlar vests and don their full riot gear as I hit “refresh” on my keyboard and read that Officer Steven Roach had just been acquitted of any crime related to the death of Timothy Thomas, an unarmed African-American man whom Roach had shot in the back as he ran away from the Officer. As many of my readers will know, in April 2001, this sparked the largest “race riots” (aka civil unrest) in the U.S. since Rodney King’s beating in 1992. As I watched that Fall, the police had come out in full force to prevent any such civil disobedience in the wake of the verdict.

I was 21-years-old as I stood looking out that window. Weeks before, my only occupation had been to stroll safely among the 150-year-old buildings of an upper-middle-class mostly-white college, nicknamed “J Crew U.” 

That day, only 50 miles from that campus, I remembered my frustration the Spring of the civil unrest, looking at other faces that looked exactly like my own, as we all decried the prejudices of our society.

As I watched the scene unfolding at the courthouse, I pondered my vow to leave that security to embark on a deeper understanding of these problems before returning to bemoan and intellectualize them from the safety of a classroom.

I carefully considered each of those personal choices as I watched the police strap on semi-automatic weapons near the end of my shift, and I thought of my mile long journey to the parking lot where my car awaited me. At that moment, the weight of that choice hit me. But something else hit me, too -- the fact that I had a choice.

That day, I made it safely back to my car. No police officer questioned or followed me as I put my head down and briskly walked the distance. They were there to protect me. And I knew that.  I got in my car, turned on the radio, hit the freeway, and made it back to the safety of my tree-lined crime-free campus within the hour. And the next day, I went back to the city, and in the evening I returned to the safety of my home. Day after day, week after week.

As I chugged along working toward justice in a deeply socially-fractured city, things were tougher than I had ever known them. I remember a letter to a friend, in which I wrote of craving the talents of the chameleon, the ability to change colors to best suit my surroundings, for it seemed that I was trying to bridge an impossible gap. How could I get cops and community members to trust one another, when neither group entirely trusted me?

I remember a day, shortly after the acquittal, when I saw an angry African-American man coming out of the family court building as I waited for the crosswalk light to change. I noticed him and turned away. He was shouting and waving his arms, and as he passed me, he bent down, with his lips to my ear, and shouted, “FUCK WHITE PEOPLE!” As his spit and rage washed over me, I kept my head down, and honestly, I still felt safe. There were lots of other people around, and though I said nothing, my first thought was, “You have every right to be pissed off!”

But I never acknowledged my own complicity in that rage. It wasn’t until I read the article titled, “Trayvon Martin Was Afraid, Too,” that I really understood how my feeling of security and acceptance in the face of overt threat was mortally intertwined with the threat and fear that Timothy Thomas and Trayvon Martin experienced as they were chased down and killed by so-called “law enforcers” simply for being young, Black men.

It does not matter that my desire for social justice brought me to the place, that courthouse, that street corner on that day. In a moment when the entire city was on a razors-edge, I could allow all of that rage to wash over, around, and through me because it was not mine to hold. It was his, and at that moment, I allowed it to be his alone. I was not pissed off with him. I just felt distanced and saddened. I felt guilt but never did I feel the anger that I should have felt.

When I worked as a victim advocate, I was forever telling women that anger could be construed as a positive emotion. When we feel angry, we feel energetic. Anger is a catalyst to change. The key to unlocking the positive elements of anger is to make that change a positive one.

Regardless of the shade of our complexion, every one of us has the reason and the responsibility to get angry when one of our young community members is senselessly killed because of misplaced fear. When we use that energy to demand that the individual killer is brought to justice, we have our voices heard, but what if we take those energies even further? What if we look at the reasons for the misplaced fear that led to the killing in the first place? What if we think of all the young men whose lives could be saved if we made changes to the systems that led to these killings? What if we used our energy to make positive changes, rather than focusing on retaliation against those who have already caused harm? If utilized and concentrated, our anger could be turned from a destructive force to a transformative one. More than any single prosecution or firing, fundamental change to how we view one another is the greatest honor we could bestow on Trayvon, and other victimized young men, in the wake of this tragedy.