You Mad Yet? On the Murder of Trayvon Martin and the Question of Tipping Points

by Mia McKenzie

On Saturday, George Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges in the murder of Trayvon Martin. Or, put another way, white supremacy allowed a man to stalk and murder an unarmed black teenager and walk away. If you don’t understand how and why this case was about race, which, I believe, requires only the barest minimum of understanding about the world we live in, then this piece is not for you. I’m not the least bit interested in explaining something so incredibly obvious. If you insist on pretending that none of this is about race, please just excuse yourself from this conversation. You don’t deserve to sit at the grown-ups’ table.

If you’re still reading, I’ll assume you don’t have your head up your ass and that the role of race in this case is clear to you. Great. Now, since we’re all on the same page, my only question is:

Are we mad enough yet?

Because here’s the thing: the system didn’t fail. The system did precisely what it was designed to do. This is the way it has always worked. The way it worked for Emmett Till 60 years ago, for Rekia Boyd 16 months ago, and for the countless unarmed black and brown people killed by white supremacy before, in between, and after them. This country was built on the dehumanization of people of color–the genocide of the Native American, the enslavement and mass murder of the African. This is what we do. So, the question isn’t why. The question isn’t how, in 2013, this is still possible. The question is, simply, are we mad enough yet? And if so, what are we prepared to do about it?

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Because it’s not going to stop. In this country,  a black woman, man, or child is killed every 28 hours by a cop or vigilante. Prisons are overflowing with black bodies disproportionately locked up. A year ago, Marissa Alexander was sentenced to 20 years in prison for firing warning shots into the air to protect herself from an abusive husband. A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled against a person’s right to remain silent unless we have the wherewithal (the education, the presence of mind, the absence of a cop’s foot on our throats, etc.) to make it clear that our silence is intended as an exercise of our rights. A key point of the Voting Rights Act, meant to protect black folks from disenfranchisement, was decimated a couple of weeks ago. Something’s happening here. The lives of black people have never been valued much in this country, but there used to be at least a trend towards pretending that they were. Now, it seems, even that’s gone.On Sunday, I marched in a protest over the Zimmerman verdict, with maybe a thousand other people in Oakland. Through all the signs and shouting, I kept wondering if this was all. If a few rallies, a few marches, some windows broken by white manarchists, will be as much as we are willing to do in the face of this sustained assault on our humanity. I wondered if, after a couple of days, the protesting will stop and people will just go home and forget. Again. (Or what if we do push back hard enough to get federal charges brought against Zimmerman? Then what? The goal cannot simply be to see George Zimmerman jailed. One more person in the PIC won’t bring Trayvon Martin back, and won’t likely do anything to prevent the next Trayvon from meeting the next Zimmerman. The problem is so much bigger than one vigilante. So, what is it that we really want? Changes to the Florida laws that allowed Zimmerman to walk free? Changes to all the laws everywhere in this country that put so much power in the hands of already-powerful and equally brutal forces, such as racist police officers?)I was reminded that a tipping point of the Civil Rights Movement, the act that finally forced the country to take seriously what was happening to black folks at the hands of Jim Crow, was four little girls in Birmingham being blown apart in the 16th Street Baptist Church before Sunday School by a bomb set by the Ku Klux Klan. It took that level of evil for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to be passed ten months later. It took that level of unconscionable violence and hatred for people to get outraged, angry and ashamed enough on a national level for something substantial to be done.It seems, in 2013, that the killings of our children aren’t enough.So, what it’s going to take this time?