;
Eighteen.
That's how many black people are murdered per day in America. If you
don't have the misfortune to live near one of those eighteen, you didn't hear
about any of them.
There are nearly 7,000 African American homicides a year, but only one has grabbed us by our eyeballs and won't let go. The Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman killing has propelled itself to the front of our national consciousness, while the others go virtually unnoticed.
Why
all the attention? What so different about this case?
Nothing.
It's not about the case; it's about the cast.
It
doesn't even matter if George Zimmerman is guilty or innocent, that's beside
the point.
The
point, of course, is race. When a gangbanger bangs one out, it's a simple,
common crime. But when a sort-of-white wannabe cop and neighborhood bully kills
a black teenager, a couple of strange, powerful things happen.
First,
the victim becomes a choirboy by acclamation. It's as if the populace couldn't
understand the narrative if the kid had a pot bust in junior high.
And
second, the killer becomes a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
L ook,
I don't want to trivialize this or offend anyone's sensibilities, but there is
a direct parallel here with the use of the N word.
Nobody
likes it, but if you use it you'd better be black. A black man killing another
black man is an all-too-common tragedy. A white man killing a black man is an
act of race war.
Our
collective memories know that there is something especially heinous about this
kind of crime.
We
hate murderers, but not all murders are considered equal. A killing in the
'hood is a shame. A serial killing is an outrage. If the details are
particularly gruesome we make a movie about it.
But
even an interracial school slaughter like Virginia Tech, where one person killed
32, has less impact on the nation than the Zimmerman case. When the murderer
was a disturbed Asian boy and most of the victims white, race didn't seem to be
a factor. It's the act that sticks in
our minds four years later, not the perpetrator.
I'm
willing to bet not ten percent of my readers can bring the name Seung-Hui Cho
to mind when thinking about Virginia Tech. I know I had to Google it.
But
George Zimmerman's name will be remembered in four years; those of us still
alive will remember it in forty. Whether he's guilty or not.
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