“We are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken,” US President Barack Obama pontificated after the verdict concerning the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. Obama astounded African American compatriots and many progressive whites and non-whites across America. Institutionalised racism in the form of racial profiling of young black men is rife in the US today. This seething racial oppression long preceded the macabre Florida cold-blooded murder that conjured up an ataxia of testimony, and much grist for redoubtable doubt in the “American Dream” from which young African American males are doomed to exclusion. The Zimmerman verdict, in effect, allowed African-Americans to draw threads together and start making sense of the contradictions inherent in contemporary American society. The Martin-Zimmerman case elicited “strong passions”, to paraphrase Obama, who appealed for calm reflection after the verdict. His pleas fell on deaf ears. Shortly after Zimmerman's acquittal was announced late Saturday, spontaneous protest marches erupted in cities across the United States. The largest were in New York and Los Angeles, but significant numbers also hit the streets in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, Boston, San Diego and Atlanta. The verdict itself was a daredevil deed designed to provoke and stir up racial hatred. It was also a symptom and expression of the racism that rages throughout America. In New York, thousands of people marched to Times Square Sunday night, chanting “Justice for Trayvon Martin!” Most demonstrations were motivated by overcoming the hurt and humiliation embodied in Martin's murder, and questioning the fairness of the US justice system, lauded by its functionaries as the fairest in the world. The American dream is running out of steam. The ultimate danger of this scandalous case may be the doubt it raises in America and abroad over the US justice system. This is not, after all, an isolated case. “The most fundamental of civil rights — the right to life — was violated the night George Zimmerman stalked and then took the life of Trayvon Martin,” says a petition on the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) website. “The whole world was looking at this case for a reason. We'd be intellectually dishonest if we didn't acknowledge the racial undertones,” said Martin family attorney Benjamin Crump. Diabolically absent is not only justice, but also political will to address these undertones. Trayvon Martin was a typical African American teenager subjected to the racial profiling of young black males in the US. Zimmerman, in contrast, is the son of a Jewish judge — and that is of vital significance — and a Peruvian of African descent, a black woman. Because Zimmerman is a private citizen, he can only be charged with a hate crime in terms of civil rights violations under federal law, extrapolated David Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor in Florida, now in private practice. To successfully prosecute Zimmerman, the Department of Justice would have to show that Zimmerman “caused the death of Trayvon Martin solely motivated by/because of his race or colour,” Weinstein told CNN in an e-mail. “This element was absent from the state trial and quite frankly doesn't exist,” he expounded. “So we have to have very responsible conversations about how we get better as a country, and move forward from this tragedy, and learn from it,” Weinstein summed up. On the night of 26 February 2012, Martin was leisurely walking back to the house of his father's fiancé after going to a Sanford, Florida convenience store. Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch vigilante volunteer, spotted Martin, stalked Martin and called the police. Zimmerman and Martin soon got into a physical altercation after which Martin was shot dead. Attorneys aired competing theories during the trial about that fight. Zimmerman was charged with second degree murder on 11 April 2012. Meanwhile, confidence in US President Obama has fast been waning in African American communities across the US. Obama weighed in on the controversy, saying about a month after Martin was killed that the incident required national “soul-searching”. The comment came to nothing. Obama has metamorphosed in office into just another US president — black or not, it does not matter in the least. His stymied plans to protect underprivileged and disadvantaged Americans has come to naught. The Martin murder evokes memories of the Rodney King case in 1991, when videotape of white Los Angeles police officers clubbing an African-American man after a deadly car chase prompted a bitter nationwide, race-tinged national hullabaloo. Just as in the case of Martin in Florida, justice was interrupted. A California criminal court failed to convict the officers filmed in acts of police brutality. Riots ensued in Los Angeles. The Justice Department then filed a civil rights suit against the officers, alleging “deprivations of federal rights under colour of law,” and two were convicted in 1993. A court sentenced them to 30 months in federal prison. African American civil rights activists and human rights advocates in the US want Zimmerman's head, even though he has not conclusively been shown to have lied about the murder of Martin. Nevertheless, Weinstein warned that the Justice Department cannot file similar charges against Zimmerman because he is a private citizen, a neighbourhood vigilante, and not a police officer or government official. “There are no other relevant sections under which to prosecute him,” other than the hate crime statute, which covers “offenses involving actual or perceived race, colour, religion, or national origin,” Weinstein elucidated. However, Martin's family can still file a civil wrongful death lawsuit against Zimmerman to seek penalties and damages. Such a legal move carries no criminal penalty or prison time. Civil rights suits are conducted against government and not against individuals. US Attorney-General Eric Holder signalled the unlikelihood of filing federal hate crimes charges against Zimmerman. “For a federal hate crime, we have to prove the highest standard in the law,” Holder declared in April 2012, 45 days after Zimmerman shot Martin in what was described by civil rights activists as a racially motivated killing. “We have to show that there was specific intent to do the crime with requisite state of mind,” Holder insisted. Be that as it may, there is something amiss about the US justice system and judicial proceedings when a killing like that of Martin cannot be prosecuted effectively under law. The jury in the Martin-Zimmerman case consisted of five white females and one non-white female. It is not clear if the “non-white” was an African American or a Latina. Zimmerman's acquittal of state murder and manslaughter charges Saturday demonstrated that the Florida jury rejected the hypothesis that Zimmerman wilfully intended to kill Martin. Jurists concluded that there was no evidence of a racial motivation necessary for federal charges that he violated Martin's civil rights. The verdict only served to open new wounds. The fatal gunshot was a mortal blow to all the presumed gains of the American civil rights movement. The US might have a black president today, but the sad reality is that millions of African American males are persecuted and prosecuted, murdered and maimed under the eyes of the US justice system. In the case of Martin, by the time the police arrived on the murder scene, the hapless teenager was dead. Florida's controversial gun laws are also to blame. Gun laws in the US regulate the sale, possession and use of firearms and ammunition. State laws vary, and are independent of existing federal firearms laws. States like Massachusetts, where the death penalty does not apply, for example, are easier on gun laws than states like conservative and reactionary Florida. The latter is broader in scope, the former more limited than federal laws. Firearm owners in the US are subject to the firearm laws of the state they are in, and not exclusively their state of residence. Reciprocity is not always guaranteed. For instance, Idaho recognises an Oregon permit, but Oregon does not recognise an Idaho permit. Florida, among the most right wing of US states, issues a license to carry both concealed weapons and firearms. There is another sinister aspect to the Martin-Zimmerman case: the rivalry between Latinos and African Americans. The political dimension of Latino resurgence in American society is literally spiralling inexorably. And, nowhere more so than in Florida. From the start, prosecutors faced a difficult case; weak on evidence and long on public outrage. Zimmerman had the power of self-defence laws on his side. And Zimmerman was amply assisted by a dubious police investigation and doubtful prosecutorial missteps. The initial investigation foundered when the local prosecutor balked at bringing charges, convinced that overcoming the self-defence claims would prove impossible. Zimmerman, as the television cameras showed, could not suppress an infuriating smirk. Yet, six weeks after the killing, Angela Corey, out of the blue, charged Zimmerman with second degree murder; a tall order as far as Florida is concerned. No one knows who had thrown the first punch and when precisely Zimmerman drew his gun against the unarmed Martin. There were no witnesses to the shooting and no definitive determination of which man could be heard pleading for help in the background of a 911 call. That it was impossible to tell the voice of a teenage African American from a Latino in his late twenties is in itself inexplicable, and an outrage. African American males in the US are vulnerable. Martin must have known it. Indeed, the only version of events came from Zimmerman, who did not take the stand, denying prosecutors a chance to cross-examine him. His statements to the police spoke for him at the trial. Zimmerman claimed that he shot Martin only after the teenager knocked him to the ground, punched him, straddled him and slammed his head into the concrete — cynically dubbed a “weapon,” as Zimmerman's lawyer, Mark O'Mara, described it. The proof of Martin's ill intentions was that he was loitering about in the rain with his sweatshirt's hood up. Zimmerman ostensibly grew suspicious. “Punks,” Zimmerman was reported as saying, adding yet another a profanity. “They always get away.” Zimmerman sounded curiously calm during the call he made to the police, and did not mention Martin's race until he was asked. The testimony of Rachel Jeantel, a young friend of Martin's who said he had told her on the phone that he was being followed and was scared, was dismissed as irrelevant. The moral of this sordid story is that the supposed gains made by African Americans in the heyday of the civil rights movement are fast turning into handicaps to their social and economic advancement. Murdering African American males is a recurring pattern and may become the ultimate tragedy of a long-suffering people who were brought to America as slaves, endured the horrors of bondage, denied the right to vote and suffered the indignity of being treated as second hand citizens. It seems that American society is intent on keeping African Americans as underdogs, with or without a black president. That is just an inconsequential charade.
