“Unconscious racism” was what came to mind as I watched a hidden figure answer the TV journalist’s basic question of how she reached the verdict that Trayvon Martin was intent on killing George Zimmerman.
When he coined the phrase “unconscious racism,” federal judge Clyde S. Cahill Jr. made history by opposing the federal laws that resulted in blacks being incarcerated by the thousands for possessing and selling crack, while whites sold and shot cocaine with no similar criminalization. He boldly issued an unprecedented and controversial ruling that the drug laws were unlawful because they were rooted in and based on “unconscious racism.”
What remains unacknowledged by most white Americans is that deeply engrained in their culture – and thus intrinsically part of their individual psyches – are stereotyped views and notions about black people. If one has ever witnessed whites undergo what is commonly called sensitivity awareness training, then one has seen them come to grips with the racial prejudice stamped into their subconscious behavior.
Listening to the juror, it was evident that she had little empathy for the black victim as compared to her effusive empathy for his killer. When asked directly whether she felt sorry for Trayvon Martin, she said she felt sorry for both of them, thus equating the trial and tribulation that has beset the alive killer with the death of an unarmed black kid.
The most telling symptom of unconscious racism is the denial that race is an issue. Fingers and focus are aimed at a faulty prosecutor, faulty witness or faulty law, all evading the overriding question of whether these jurors were really any different than the white juries that set white men free for killing blacks like Medgar Evers and Emmett Till.
Any discussion with whites of whether race is at the heart of any act by a white that harms a black is like tossing kryptonite at Superman. The subject is resisted with every conceivable
argument. Unconscious racism, however, infects the entire American culture. For while America has eradicated the raw race prejudice the Civil Rights Movement conquered, it has not drained from the culture the core racial prejudice it now politely calls profiling.
Many vehemently deny that race was a factor in the Trayvon Martin case, and equally vehemently deny that the present inferior social and economic condition of its former slave population is due to racism. It is as though when the civil rights laws of the sixties were thrust upon the nation, the books were closed on racism in America. This was the lesson taught both to white children and to black children – racism is over in America.
Time will tell how those fed this teaching will reconcile a nation having a black president, and a man walking free after murdering a black boy.
