As
a 65 year old African American male, I identify with Trayvon
Martin, the 17 year old youth that was killed in Sanford,
Florida, on February 26. Despite
the age difference, I visualize myself in his shoes, walking
down the dark street near a gated community, talking to
a girlfriend on the phone, and discovering that I am being
followed by a man in a truck who turns out to be a person
like George Zimmerman. Who else, among us, can truly identify
with this young man? President Obama, who only had daughters
as I did, identifies with Trayvon a bit more distantly:
as if Trayvon were his son. I guess that as an American
child in Indonesia,
Obama safely and successfully negotiated this genre of
cultural boundaries, but he realizes and identifies with
the fact that there are more lethal dangers with such
crossings for young black males living in the US. The extent of one�s identification
� which is somewhat like the degree that one empathizes
with something � ranges from no identification at all
to that degree of identification that another 17 year
old African American male in Florida might bring to the case.
Out
of this sense of empathy or identity, interlaced with
the emotions of fear, disgust, frustration, and urgency,
some people have been moved to take action as this cause
is reverberating through the public media. Political and
governmental procedure is such that there is little of
great impact that can be done to help bring justice to
Trayvon�s specific case. The Police Chief of Sanford
has suspended himself after a �no confidence� vote of
the Sanford City Council; the Florida State Attorney General
is investigating; and the Federal Justice Department is
investigating as to whether there has been a Civil Rights
violation.
The
outpouring of testimony and heated demonstrations across
the country will have little effect at this point on the
availability of justice for Trayvon and his family. However,
this degree of pre-�occupation� of the public �spaces,�
this amount of moral recoil, this amount
of disturbance in our emotional �sea� deserves a broad
correction that goes beyond Sanford
and Florida.
The phenomena of a huge swath of the nation empathizing
with Trayvon means that something similar is going on
and has been going on for a long time everywhere. This
engagement with Trayvon�s case will have its greatest
impact to the degree that we trace that emotional knot
(of fear, disgust, frustration, and urgency) that arose
because of the circumstances of Trayvon�s killing to those
similar circumstances in our own lives and in our own
community - the existence of which has �allowed� us to
empathize with Trayvon in the first place. If we then
take that knowing and turn it in to action, that is grace,
that is co-creation most powerfully.
The
crosscutting forces of social systems, economic systems,
political systems, and the criminal justice system, either
advantages us or targets us for certain �treatment.� First,
stipulating that systems are existentially collections
of people, what we identify with and how we are identified,
are the arbiters of every systemic response. Blind, ignorant,
and self deceiving people may think that if you simply
behave �right� and �work hard,� you have nothing to fear.
These non-empathetic people are wrong. A corollary of
that thinking is that true Floridians or true
�Americans� act in a particular way and, when they do,
they are �blessed� �Americans.� These blind believers
are wrong.
Trayvon�s
case and many, many, many others put the lie to these
deceptions. Other deceivers believe that if we would
only stop talking about racial and other differences,
in an effort to reach a color-blind society, the result
would be the disappearance of individual and systemic
biases. This is a self delusion; no human behavioral phenomenon
has ever disappeared when we stopped talking about it.
Frightfully, this delusion is also dangerous. In this
conception, the incidence of violations will be hidden
and the norm becomes a bland (white) stance that is very
boring and unattractive; it is absolutely unrealistic
and will not happen and should not be attempted.
So
the questions remain: where are we headed and what effective
action can a person take no matter one�s gender or skin
color, or where in the country we are? I think the first
step is to accept the truth that the elements
for similar injustice exist in every community in the
country to some degree. Step two is to accept that we
all � to some degree or other � receive
advantages from the biases of our social, economic, political,
and criminal justice systems; and we all
� to some degree or other � are targets of these systems
and the individuals that exercise these systems. Clearly
exercising the system�s logic does not necessarily mean
that one is officially an agent of the system, a
la Mr. George Zimmerman. However, we are all both
positively and negatively impacted at some time, in some
way. At this moment, there is no need to have a competition
on the rankings of oppressive practices or to acknowledge
with whose oppression we identify the most. The
social psychological dynamics are the same even if the
historical evolution of the syndromes is different. We
can all only move from our unique
collection of identities � howsoever those identities
harmonize or not. It is that identity harmonizing pattern
that is unique to humans and that displays integrity and
rationality.
Who
are you? Take action in your community by exposing injustices
at their roots, by facilitating the opportunities for
empathy for all humans, and by correcting the insensitive,
unjust laws and processes that are taking place just around
the corner. The salient injustices associated with the
Trayvon Martin case are race and the crookedness of the
criminal justice system but injustices of class, gender,
ability, age, academic status, richness or poverty, sexual
identity, nationality, and language-facility work in similar
ways. Let�s break down those dynamics for each situation
and that will have an impact on eliminating those dynamics
everywhere. An injustice anywhere opens the doors for
injustice everywhere.
Social
science tells us that we are a multiplicity of identities.
Instead of seeing ourselves as a single personality, we
all consist of multiple characters or micro-personalities,
each one with its own viewpoint, emotions and ambitions.
The mother who feeds breakfast to her children, for example,
has quite different concerns and opinions from the woman
taking part in a boardroom discussion two hours later,
and from the woman she will be with her husband that night.
Yet all three may share the same body, and none is any
more �authentic� than another. I am of African, Native
American, and European ancestry. I used to speak a little
German as well as �American� English. I am male, a father,
a husband, a politician, an administrator, a former football
player, a teacher, and a community organizer. The most
important step that we can take is to realize
that other human beings � all other human beings � are
also a multiplicity of identities and we can always be
empathetic with all of them to some degree. Remember
that empathy is not the same thing as sympathy;
many people can have more sympathy for a dog or a seal
pup than they have for other humans. Realize that
we can � by many degrees � have our best empathy with
another human being and within the human family.
In
today�s world, our ability to switch from one micro-personality
to another, according to what is demanded of us, is a
huge strength. It is a strength provided that one�s various
micro-personalities work together in harmony rather than
against each other or through confusion. The grounding
of personality is in beliefs, values, and our artistry
of presence. If your bed rock beliefs and values are split
or are in conflict, no artistry can for long present a
display that has integrity or rationality. Too much identification
with imperfect systems � like the rapacious Global Capitalist
economic system, like the racist Criminal Justice system,
like the oligarchic political system, etc. � leads to
uncorrected injustices, insanity, self blindness, and
self deception.
Rather,
it is both personal harmony and community
harmony that are all of our goals.
I am Tryvon Martin; I affirm his life and rededicate mine
to bring about harmony in my community.
BlackCommentator.com
Guest Commentator, Wilson Riles, is a
former Oakland, CA City Council Member. Click here
to contact Mr. Riles.
