People
keep asking how in this day and age can we have an all female and almost all
white jury in the George Zimmerman trial?
As a white woman myself- I ask how can we not? While disgusted with the knock-knock
joke that opened the trial, the nugget of truth there asks who in the United
States could have possibly NOT known who George Zimmerman was? In painting broad strokes, who but white
women could have the privilege of not paying attention to a case that
terrorizes the daily-lived experience of people of Color? Who but white women could be so willfully
ignorant of the world around us? Who but
White women have the privilege of believing that we don’t have, as in the words
of some of my undergraduate white female students, “a race-type thingy”
(Picower, 2012).  |
| Zimmerman's lawyer and his daughters after Jeantel testimony. #Vanilla |
By
way of example of this phenomenon, I personally care nothing about sports. Watching grown men, and the occasional woman,
chasing balls of different sizes trying to put them in a variety of places
holds no interest to me. But in our
sports-obsessed society surrounded by friends who engage with sports, it is a
conscious choice, and some level of effort, to know as little as I do. I choose to zone out when the coverage comes
on the news, I choose not to talk with my friends about it.
Choosing
to know nothing about sports is a privilege because I don’t see a connection
between sports and my daily life. Just
as knowing nothing about George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin was a choice these
jurors made because they did not see a connection between this murder and their
lives. The painful difference here is
that my ignorance is a playful joke among friends, while the ignorance of these
jurors was positioned as neutrality and in fact was what made them QUALIFIED to
serve as jurors. It is the hallmark of
our “post-racial,” “color-blind” society that the willful white ignorance that
could make a person so unaware of how race/racism and oppression operates could
be framed, in fact, as expertise. This
positioning provided the jurors with the power to make decisions over the very
things they have no understanding of. But
this willful ignorance is of course a fallacy, and while many whites believe
they are color-blind, their construction of the world around them is racialized
in a myriad of ways.
The
CNN interview with Juror B37, whom I shall call “Becky”, revealed much of
the racialized way in which she views the world, yet she is blind to the
racialization within her retelling of the case.
On the one hand, she repeatedly stated that she believed “race did not
play a role” in the case, yet her constructions of Jeantel, Martin and Zimmerman
were dripping with racial stereotypes.
She
constructed Rachel Jeantel, the young, Black, female friend of Martin, as an
object of pity. Becky “felt sorry for
her” because of her “lack of education and communication skills”. Becky decided for herself how Jeantel felt,
claiming that Rachel “felt inadequate toward everyone” and “embarrassed by
being there”. Becky feels empowered to
assign emotions to Jeantel and to decide she was “not credible” even though Becky
admits that Jeantel “was using phrases I have never
heard before, and what they meant.” Even
while ignorant of the actual words coming out of Jeantel’s mouth, Becky is
positioned to discredit Jeantel’s agency and intelligence and reduce her
to someone to feel “sadness for.” Becky
referenced “how they're living, in the environment that they're living
in.” In these statements, Becky, like
other Whites, is able to distance herself from Rachel and other Black people,
targeting how they talk, deciding how they feel, and denigrating where and how
they live. But of course, “race has
nothing to do with it”.
In lock
step with society's construction of Black teenage boys as ‘thugs’, Becky
assigns criminal elements to young Trayvon Martin. She describes him as “acting strange” and
“suspicious” and then associates this strangeness to criminal elements,
referencing “vandals”, and “break-ins” and other dangers linked with Black
teens in the white racial imagination.
Even when provided with multiple opportunities by Anderson Cooper, she
expresses no sympathy for Trayvon providing much more humanity to “George” than
for the teenager he killed. This inability to identify or empathize with
Trayvon is in keeping with every step of this case, from Zimmerman following
and murdering him, to Zimmerman initially not being charged, to the final
verdict, and now to the disturbing viral trend of “trayvoning”
in which (mainly) White teenagers take photos of themselves pretending to be
dead, wearing hoodies with skittles and ice tea. But of course, “race has nothing to do with
it.”
Finally,
only by passively and unquestioningly consuming White supremacy, can White
women who have chosen willful ignorance have the kind of tunnel vision that can
paint George Zimmerman, the murderer of a 17-year old boy, as “a
man whose heart was in the right place.” Becky chose (with support from
Zimmerman’s lawyer), to construct Zimmerman as the neighborhood beacon of
light, saving and protecting her and other white women from the dangers
presented by young teenagers of Color. Becky
explains to us that “[Zimmerman’s actions] just got displaced by the vandalism
in the neighborhoods, and wanting to catch these
people so badly, that he went above and beyond what he really should have
done”. I can almost picture her drawing
“GZ” in hearts and baking lemon bars for poor, misunderstood and frustrated
Georgie, whose only crime is being “overeager to help people” like her and the
“lady and her baby” whom he was “so overeager to help” when her house was
broken into.
In keeping with her post-racial narrative, Becky again claims race was not a factor, stating, “I think if there was another person, Spanish, white, Asian, if they came in the same situation where Trayvon was, I think George would have reacted the exact same way.” But she relates and sympathizes with George in a veiled racialized way in which she shares his frustration “with the whole situation in the neighborhood, with the break-ins and the robberies” and she assigns a level of heroism to him in the way in which he helped the neighborhood through his watch against “suspicious” people (read Black) which she would like him to continue.
 |
The representation of Blackness in Becky’s interview is not unusual. Rather it is quite the
norm in post-racial America to remove discussion of race yet rely on racial
stereotypes in the white construction of reality. Because Becky see’s herself as race-neutral,
she in fact also pleads to be found “not guilty” of racism in her decision. She and the other juror’s “put everything into everything
to get this verdict” and they “thought about it for hours and cried over it
afterwards.” The construction of the “nice white lady” is at
play here, in which these generous women who did not ask to be in this
position, worked really really hard for hours- HOURS(!) to come to a decision
about the accountability of the murderer of someone’s child. But they cried, so I guess it’s okay then.
Listen up white women. This is unacceptable. We have to stop pretending that we don’t see
race and open our eyes to the ways in which our world is shaped by our racial
privilege. We have to stop pretending
that we are race-neutral and these issues aren’t connected to us when in fact
we are agents of power (in fact, we were the decision makers in this
verdict!). We have to stop othering and discrediting
the emotional, material and lived experiences of people different from
ourselves. We have to stop pretending
that our racial ignorance is neutrality that positions us as innocent and
unraced within a white supremacist system. And when we do join in protest against racism,
we have to stop pretending that we are doing so from the same positionality as
people of Color (see this tumbler
as a positive example of owning privilege).
We have to start calling our friends out on their lack of understanding
or attention to race and engaging in constructive conversations with those
around us. While people of Color are
painfully figuring out what they are going to tell their children and their
students of Color about this verdict and what it means to live in America, we
better ask the same damn question and start talking to our White children.
Bree Picower, Ph.D.
July 16, 2013
July 16, 2013
