This topic touches on a lot of different points, and the whole issue is complicated and multi-faceted. So, let's go through a few, shall we?
The jurors did the right thing
I know, this is a little hard to hear for some, but that's simply the truth. The jurors are there to apply the law, and by the letter of the law it was very difficult to convict Zimmerman of manslaughter, let alone murder in the second degree. The burden of "beyond a reasonable doubt" is very high, and there is reasonable doubt here. It is certainly plausible that Zimmerman thought he was being attacked with fatal violence and reacted under duress with what he thought was the only way to save his life. This is plausible, not likely, but it is enough to cast reasonable doubt on any conviction.
This does not mean that what Zimmerman did was right
Nor does it mean that Trayvon Martin was wrong. That's a separate issue. When you carry a weapon, you have a burden to not put yourself in positions where you will have to use it unnecessarily. You cannot go around stalking random dudes in the middle of the night because you think they look suspicious. You are consciously putting yourself in positions where it's more likely you could feel compelled to kill a man.
At the very, very least Zimmerman was guilty of being incredibly irresponsible, and of racial profiling. The fact that he got away with it isn't nearly as significant as the fact that many people defended this behavior. Whether or not there are racial motivations behind those defenses, that fact for many black people reinforces something they've experienced their entire lives: that there are many ways in which race affects their lives. And the fact that they can legitimately feel that way is an issue.
Let's move on from Zimmerman's case, which wasn't particularly interesting, to the other racially charged topics you talked about. Bear with me, I'm going to go through a lot of different concepts and it's going to be long. Try to read all of it before jumping to any judgments, and read it carefully. Feel free to ask for clarification on any subject if I'm not being clear, or if you want some sources for my claims where I didn't provide them.
Racial prejudice does not require malice, or conscious discrimination
The human mind is a curious thing. It's very imperfect and uses a lot of shortcuts to jump to conclusions. One of the effects is that prejudices become ingrained in people. Those prejudices don't need to be conscious. They certainly don't require malice. But that doesn't mean they're not real.
If two people walk in for the same job interview with the exact same qualifications, but one of them is black and the other is white, the latter is more likely to be hired. That's an empirical fact -- we have countless studies to back it up. That doesn't mean that the person doing the hiring was consciously racist or acting maliciously -- but prejudice works in curious ways. Maybe he thought the white guy looked more trustworthy, or maybe he just wasn't comfortable with the black guy. Those feelings are real, and largely subconscious. They don't make the employer a bad person, just a human being with biases and prejudices like everyone else.
But that doesn't make those effects any less real.
The U.S. justice system is racist in some respects
Did you know that punishments for possession of crack are much higher than those for powder cocaine? The difference used to be insane: 5 grams of crack was enough to get you charged with a felony, whereas it took 500 grams of powdered cocaine to get a felony charge. This changed in 2011 -- when the bar for crack was lifted to
28 grams. Still a pretty big 18 to 1 disparity for what is essentially the same substance. Couple that with the fact that black people are a lot more likely to smoke crack than blow cocaine (due to socio-economic and cultural issues) and you have what amounts to a justice system that selects by race,
whether or not the motivations are racist. It's the effects that matter -- and the effect is that the drug war is racist
in its effect for no good reason.
There are other issues, too. There's racial profiling, which is absolutely real. A black man in an expensive car is looked upon much more suspiciously than a white man in the same car. Whether or not this is justified based on personal experience doesn't matter: people are being prejudged by their skin color. That is racist by definition.
Similarly, stop-and-frisk policies routinely and explicitly target blacks.
Mayor Bloomberg even defended this. Whether or not they are effective (and there's quite a bit of evidence that suggests they're not) or whether those profilings are justifiable from a statistical perspective doesn't diminish a simple fact:
if you are black, you will be targeted solely because of your skin color. You are
not being treated equal to other citizens.
The justice system has racist effects in other ways too. Blacks are more likely to be arrested, more likely to be convicted, more likely to be targeted, more likely to be on death row, more harshly punished when they are convicted etc. Remember: none of this means the people doing those things are consciously racist or acting maliciously. They're not evil people trying to keep black people down. They just have subconscious prejudices. But the effects are still very real.
Even simple prejudices can have very large effects
There are many, many scientific studies on the subject of the effect of prejudices. Prejudices do not need to be conscious and the person harboring does not need to be malicious for them to be real, and have an effect. Blacks are less likely to be hired for a job, given equal qualifications. They're less likely to be born into a position where they could have these equal qualifications to begin with. They're more likely to be selected by police for stop-and-frisk or other legal procedures. When they do commit crimes, they're both more likely to get caught and more likely to be punished harshly. During the last elections, many voting rules seemed to explicitly target blacks (or rather, poor constituencies). Early voting was limited or eliminated in many Republican-controlled states and areas, voter registration rules that disproportionately affect blacks were installed, gerrymandering tried to limit black participation in government. Again: those policies didn't state that as their goals,
but that was their effect. And if you're black, what you feel, what you experience, is that effect.
Don't think about this from the perspective of an outsider looking in, seeing that there are some justifications for these policies. Look at it from the perspective of a black man. How would you feel if you saw those policies target your people? If you had felt suspicion at every police stop? If you had
I could show you all these studies, but they don't do a very good job of communicating the emotional impact. I feel that this is a fairly easy (though not very scientific) and powerful demonstration of the effects of racial profiling:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ge7i60GuNRg" frameborder="0"></iframe>
Another one is
this story of a black family adopting a white girl, and the reactions it sees every day. Those people reacting are not acting maliciously. They are not consciously racist. But that does not make those reactions and less painful for the family.
Historical realities are very important in this discussion
Here are some painful but very real facts that affect every black family to this day, regardless of their social status. Everyone knows these facts, but it's a little different when you would have been one of the people this talks about.
Slavery was practiced in the United States for 150 years.
Slavery was followed by 100 years of
legal oppression of black people. Segregation, Jim Crow, it was all real.
This was coupled with illegal but still very real
violence against blacks. Lynchings in the south were not isolated incidents. White on black violence was rarely prosecuted.
Whole towns were burned down in racial violence. This lasted up until the 1960s.
When Democrats turned away from these racist policies in the 1960s, the Republicans consciously started to court racists with racially abusive policies in what they dubbed the
Southern strategy. Let me say that again: in the 1970s and 1980s (and in some ways to this day) one of the two major political parties was
consciously and maliciously racist to get more votes. They never did so explicitly, but they did it implicitly. We have tapes of major political advisors for the Republican party (
most notably Lee Atwater) plainly stating this as fact. This doesn't just say something about thosee Republicans, but it also says something else that many people miss:
There were(/are) so many racists that appealing to them was a successful political strategy.
When these legal barriers were (largely) eliminated in the 1960s, things got a lot better. But different mechanisms took over and some still remain to this day. Prejudices are real and do not need to be conscious or have malicious intentions to still have real effects. The fact that things are now better, especially from a purely legal standpoint, does not mean that racism is now a thing of the past.
The racial gap, too, is a very real thing
If there really is no difference between whites and blacks, why is
racial inequality still this large? Nonwhites earn
65% of what whites earn. Nonwhites' houses are worth
half of the houses of whites. White families have
six times the net worth of non-white families. Those are staggering numbers.
I don't mean to belittle the plight of poor white people, though. They people have it bad, too, and deserve assistance too. I'm in favor of more and more comprehensive welfare, of more measures to help
all groups better their lives. But the fact is that black people
on average have it worse than white people, in a variety of ways. And any policies specifically meant for minorities are meant to help remedy that fact. Those policies should be evaluated by whether or not they work, and not on gut feel or ideological feelings about treating people equally.
So yes, there is still a racial gap. If you look at any collection of numbers you can see that. Neither are blacks treated equally even if laws are on their face race-neutral. Discrimination doesn't need to be explicit or codified to be very real in its effects.
You don't wash away 250 years of oppression and continuing discrimination with 40 years of legislation. This is a deep-running issue, and a very complicated problem that requires and will require a lot of work to solve over the coming generations. And you can't solve it by pretending that racial discrimination is gone when it really isn't. When the income disparity between the groups is still very real, when there are policies that implicitly if not explicitly target blacks, when the prejudices of employers and people on the street still negatively affect blacks.
Combine all of this, and you should not be surprised that many blacks feel that society is still racist, still judges them and still makes life harder for them than for others. Mostly, because society really still does that.
Affirmative action is in place to correct these issues
Treating everyone completely equally and pretending that these income disparities do not exist is the same as denying reality. Yes, you can get support that is specifically aimed at your ethnic group. This is so to help that group transcend
And those policies do not make up for the worse positions that many blacks start out in. The schools in their districts are worse. They are born in poorer families. They are born into a culture that does not treat them like equal citizens, especially so when they come from the shittier parts of town.
Blacks still earn significantly less than whites. They have fewer possessions and the possessions do they have are worth less. That's why affirmative action still exists.
It's also why the NAACP exists. It exists because back in the day, someone had to come up for black rights. It exists because these days, racial disparity is still a real thing. It exists because not talking about race doesn't make these problems go away. Also, as far as I know the NAACP does not object to people using the word black. If they do that's silly, but not particularly salient -- a detail.
On a positive note, things are improving slowly
We do not live in times of Jim Crow. Legally, blacks are much better protected and there have been real gains in income and assets, too. But those gains have been slow and steady, and they will require attention for several generations before the problem is solved. It will require more targeted and more aggressive action, too, in many areas.
Tragically, recent resurgences of the post-racial society hypothesis only make this more difficult. While those people may think that they're helping society move beyond race, they're actually standing in the way of policies that are slowly helping minorities crawl out of the morass of centuries of oppression. It's a lot more harmful to stop that progress prematurely than it is to let it go on a little too long. And we're not nearly at the point where we can stop those policies.
Frankly, Syphon, it seems to me that you're reacting from emotion, gut feel and general statements rather than thorough research into these issues. There is a lot of literature on this subject, and it's very very complicated. It's hard to get into, but there are very good reasons for a lot of the things you're complaining about. We're talking about a contentious and very ugly topic, about the feelings of very large groups of people, and about the difficulties in empathizing with situations you've never been in. It doesn't really do to speak quickly and easily about these topics without putting in time to understand all sides of the debate.
Might I suggest something? You should read more on this subject, because there's a lot to be said. A good way to start might be by reading
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, which deals with the racial effects of the current American judicial system and prison complex. It's just one aspect of a much larger problem, but it does show how that one aspect affects black people, and its very serious problems.
