Even the torrid weather itself seems to be reflecting the conflagration of passions ignited by the Zimmerman trial verdict last week. While the decision of the jury may have reasonably followed that evidence presented – as most legal analysts seem to concur – an unsettling sense of justice denied lingers.
Nothing offends a human being more than the experience or even the perception of being treated differently – that is, in a stereotypically dismissive or demeaning way – simply because of who his or her parents are. After all, what determines one’s racial identity as black or white – and now black-Hispanic or white-Hispanic – is exactly that: an accident of birth or, more precisely, conception.
A birth is never really an accident as our faith sees it. Every child is a gift, willed and loved by God, whether the parents themselves know and accept that – or not. Every person, regardless of who his or her parents are, or how she or he was conceived, is a being of moral worth. Our faith does not permit us to value the dignity of a human person differently because of any kind of status: born or unborn, rich or poor, male or female, black or white.
The very suspicion – for many, it is a conviction – that race had something to do with why Mr. Zimmerman and Mr. Martin ended up in that fateful confrontation is exactly what unleashes such anger, disappointment, outrage and condemnation. The inability of our trial justice system either to dispel that suspicion definitively or to confirm and redress it decisively is what opens the question of who or what can.
However one may deem the extent to which race and profiling drove the course of events that fatal night, both Mr. Martin and Mr. Zimmerman have become in some ways icons of the very stereotyping and profiling we would hope not to fall prey to. How many can honestly claim not to have had some opinion about what one or the other was really up to that night? Are we not tempted to form our own judgments – even before we know the facts?
No doubt the outcome of the trial opens up a deeply felt wound among all who had hopes that, over four years past the election of a black-white president – considering parents, once again, as the racial determinants – we would finally be entering a “post-racial” era. Is there any reason to believe now that because of the events that took place in Sanford, Fla., over the past year and a half, our entire nation is regressing to racial stereotyping and divisions?
We find no cause for rash and alarmist conclusions. Nor do we see reason for doubting the basic decency and fair-mindedness of most Americans. Some would, of course, profoundly disagree. Yet it would be naïve to ignore the stated intent of some perennial discontents who know all too well how to manipulate a compliant media. Taking advantage of this volatile situation to advance their own egos or ideologies, they use strategies such as the fomenting of class warfare and violent confrontation to promote their own agenda.
Honest soul-searching and, most of all, prayer in the wake of the current unrest can do all of us much spiritual and moral good. We will only be in position to be instruments of healing if our own hearts are free of any attitudes that lead us to stereotype or demean any individuals, simply because they belong to a certain genetic, socio-cultural or economic cohort.
Even if this is not done consciously or deliberatively, God may reveal to us our inconsistencies and hypocrisies if we only allow him some room. And we can take confidence in the scriptural counsel that where there is sin, grace abounds all the more!