Held to answer

George Zimmerman’s best defense may have been his fearful baby face.

He was accused of trying to be a hero or a wanna-be cop. He looked like an ordinary man, scared and tired of being scared.

“They always get away,” he told the 911 dispatcher, reporting what he thought might be a suspect in a series of neighborhood break-ins.

Unfortunately, the one who didn’t get away – Trayvon Martin – apparently wasn’t the problem. He fit the description of burglars who had been freely roaming Zimmerman’s neighborhood. (Have any of those burglars come forward and apologized to Martin’s mother: “Hey, if we’d known some creepy-ass cracker was going to shoot a brother, we’d have robbed another neighborhood.”)

The news media let the mob dictate that this story would be about Martin’s skin color. Race came into it because there are Americans whose only interest in history is our “historic racism,” those years when slavery was legal in the U.S. The adjective “shameful” is often attached to it as in “America’s shameful history of slavery.”

World history is filled with slave owners of all skin colors. Slavery is not original to America, but Western whites have been unique in their willingness to acknowledge and condemn slavery. The mob knows how to work this.

One of the fruits of American slavery was the instinctive terror it gave Southern blacks towards whites. There’s a memorable description of this in James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” his saga about life among poor, white sharecroppers in 1936.

Early in the book, Agee is on a country road in Alabama. He and his photographer, Walker Evans, are transfixed by a simple church. It’s surrounded mostly by weeds, but it seems to possess a holy spirit right down to each board and nail-head. Agee and Evans, both white, are wondering how to get inside this locked church when “a young negro couple” walk by.

“They were young, soberly buoyant of body, and strong, the man not quite thin, the girl not quite plump, and I remembered their mild and sober faces … and their extreme dignity, which was as effortless, unvalued, and undefended in them as the assumption of superiority which suffuses a rich and social adolescent boy… .”

After the young black couple has walked on, Agee realizes they might know something about the church. He starts to follow them, but they are so far ahead he breaks into a trot. They hear him and turn to see a white man coming after them.

“The young woman’s whole body was jerked down tight as a fist into a crouch from which immediately, the rear food skidding in the loose stone so that she nearly fell, like a kicked cow scrambling out of a creek, eyes crazy … she sprang forward … a suddenly, terrified wild animal. In this same instance, the young man froze … his right hand stiff towards the girl… .”

Agee raised his hand, palm outwards, approached them slowly and stopped a yard short of them. The girl’s eyes were filled with tears, while Agee is full of horror and pity and self-hatred at shattering their dignity. He tries to make amends:

“I’m very sorry! I’m very sorry if I scared you! I didn’t mean to scare you at all. I wouldn’t have done any such thing for anything.”

Agee’s behavior becomes one of “faked casualness” while the couple’s “faces were secret, soft and utterly without trust of me … and they had to stand here now and hear what I was saying, because in that country no negro safely walks away from a white man… .”

In the 21st Century, racism has evolved. Now young, black males can instill that kind of automatic fear that Agee elicited. Unlike Agee, though, some young, black males revel in this power.

Did Trayvon Martin know that he had scared George Zimmerman? We don’t know. But he did not reach out and say, “Hey, man, I’m sorry if I scared you. All I got here is some Skittles and iced tea.”

While Agee inherited his power to scare from white plantation owners (although his family didn’t own a plantation or slaves), young, black males like Martin inherited their power to scare from a thug culture that a lot of people are justifiably afraid of. Blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime, and the black community is perceived as accommodating criminals who share their skin color.

It doesn’t help that the media will spotlight a white-on-black shooting as an example of race-based injustice, while ignoring a black-on-white crime that may be just as race-based. The public is not fooled. Censoring this part of America’s “conversation on race” doesn’t make it go away.

I can sympathize with a man in Zimmerman’s position because I know what it’s like to feel helpless. If you don’t have a right to your own property, what rights do you have?

But as a woman I know there can be another side to men like Zimmerman. When they feel put upon and want someone to push around, the easiest target is often female.

So there was something satisfying about an all-female jury sitting in judgment on this case.

It took courage for these six women not to pacify the mob who had demanded Zimmerman’s prosecution. The jury showed more courage than the prosecutor.

As attorney and columnist Wendy Murphy wrote, “A prosecutor with integrity would have refused to file charges in the first place. … A smart prosecutor would have redirected the social conversation away from murder, and toward deeper problems of fear and disrespect.”

Now we’ll have protests for the next few days. There will be calls for eliminating “Stand Your Ground” laws in hopes of disarming future George Zimmermans or making it easier to convict them. At least one black minister immediately invoked “the original sin” of slavery in an interview on NPR.

None of this will help.

Let’s see how many people remember that this case began with thieves entering homes, taking what they wanted and getting away with it.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

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Rodney King’s ‘Junkyard of Dreams’