Florida teenager Trayvon Martin had been dead for a month and the national furor over his shooting by vigilante George Zimmerman was into its third week before anyone, to my knowledge, asked that fundamental question. Law enforcement officials, experts, and commentators across the spectrum had assumed that the only issue was whether Zimmerman was entitled to use Florida\u2019s \u201cstand your ground\u201d law to justify shooting Martin.<\/p>\n
MSNBC commentator Melissa Harris Perry finally declared what the undisputed evidence on the Sanford, Florida, police dispatcher\u2019s 911 tape of the run-up to the killing shows: 17 year-old Martin, armed only with food, was being aggressively pursued by a grownup who outweighed him by 100 pounds, plus a 9-millimeter firearm. Under the \u201cstand your ground\u201d law, Martin had every right to use whatever force, including lethal, was necessary to protect himself from the threatening confrontation Zimmerman initiated.<\/p>\n
Did Martin physically attack and severely beat Zimmerman after the latter confronted him, as Zimmerman alleges? Evidence so far suggests not, but under Florida’s law, it wouldn\u2019t matter if Trayvon had pounded Zimmerman bloody. Zimmerman was the aggressor, brandishing deadly force. The right to \u201cstand your ground\u201d was entirely Martin\u2019s. Those who scrutinize the police video for evidence of injury to Zimmerman perpetuate the myth that the law was automatically on the aggressor\u2019s side.<\/p>\n
Virtually everyone seems to have accepted that \u201cstand your ground\u201d contains a hidden covenant: it is designed to protect a \u201chigher status\u201d person who feels threatened and uses force injurious to a person of \u201clower status.\u201d It seems inconceivable that the law could be used to exonerate a black teenager who used force against a white (or, Latino-white in Zimmerman\u2019s case) grownup who had awarded himself superior authority.<\/p>\n
Notably, the National Rifle Association\u2014which repeats after nearly every heinous shooting that the remedy is to arm the victim(s)\u2014has been strangely reluctant to declare that black teenagers should be allowed to carry guns in areas where they fear racially-motivated vigilante attacks.<\/p>\n
But it isn\u2019t just conservatives. In 2012, as always, nearly everyone accepted that ground-standing privileges accrue only to the older, whiter party of the first part, not the younger, blacker party of the second part. In the disposition of Martin\u2019s killing, only Zimmerman\u2019s feelings, Zimmerman\u2019s fears, Zimmerman\u2019s story, and Zimmerman\u2019s life had value.<\/p>\n
These appalling assumptions, so accepted they weren\u2019t even questioned, stem from the poisonous culture that, I argue in a Politico op-ed<\/a>, authorities across the spectrum have created by continually stigmatizing young black men as a class and generation. President Barack Obama<\/a> blamed African Americans\u2019 \u201cepidemic of violence\u201d on \u201centire generation of young men in our society,\u201d connected \u201cthis generation\u201d of young African Americans to \u201cviolence\u201d and \u201caddiction,\u201d and fanned anxiety toward \u201cteenagers hanging around on street corners.\u201d CNN\u2019s Roland Martin<\/a> branded today\u2019s young African Americans as \u201ca generation of folks that do not value life.\u201d New York Times liberal columnistBob Herbert<\/a> has labeled young black men as \u201cinsane,\u201d \u201cpredators,\u201d and \u201crunning wild,\u201d among other epithets. That\u2019s before we turn to Fox News.<\/p>\n How do these prominent prejudices differ from Zimmerman\u2019s presumption that Martin\u2014due to his young age, black race, new generation, and public presence\u2014was inordinately likely to be a drug-crazed, criminal threat? Those stigmas reduced Martin\u2019s status to an inferior automatically unentitled to have his feelings, fears, life, or rights valued when pitted against a superior citizen represented by Zimmerman.<\/p>\n The way to get rid of \u201cstand your ground\u201d laws is to reverse the assumptions of privilege that governed discussion of Trayvon Martin\u2019s killing and demonstrate that such laws can also be used by the very sorts of people their champions intended to target.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Who has the right to \u201cstand your ground\u201d? April 01, 2012 Florida teenager Trayvon Martin had been dead for a month and the national furor over his shooting by vigilante George Zimmerman was into its third week before anyone, to my knowledge, asked that fundamental question. Law enforcement officials, experts, and commentators across the spectrum […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-772","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=772"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":773,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/772\/revisions\/773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}