Why Trayvon Martin's Murderer is Still Free

After freely confessing to police that he indeed gunned down Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman was free to take his gun and go home. So for weeks, Martin's parents have been trying to get Zimmerman arrested for the murder. What has been confounding to sensible Americans is how the process of  justice in this day and age can be so seemingly a combination of absurd and inert. 

As some are realizing with the trickle of details from the  case, "black" and "guilt" are synonyms for many people including cops, and even some black cops. It is rooted in what I have historically referred to as the most nefarious public relations campaign in history. The permanent existence of black people in America was through slavery. In order for slavery to exist as an accepted institution among Europeans who considered themselves enlightened, those Europeans would have to justify otherwise innocent blacks as deserving of being held captive for life. The justification they used was that blacks were by nature, more mentally deficient, more amoral, more incompetent, more lazy, more threatening, more suspicious and simply more inferior than Americans of European descent. Thus, the kidnap and bondage of Africans was just fine. 

This was the genesis of the absurd and inert process of justice that has followed Trayvon Martin's murder, even in the age of a President Obama. Old traditions die hard. In 2012 a black kid is murdered by someone who seems to be a racially obsessed, unstable paranoiac with a police record and the cops just roll their eyes and let the guy go. The cops bought the paranoiac's imagined accusations of the unarmed black kid being dangerous. Right there they closed the case. End of investigation because to them, that unarmed kid with a bullet hole in him was more mentally deficient, more amoral, more incompetent, more lazy, more threatening, more suspicious and simply more inferior. He was guilty of being black and so he received what millions of Americans subconsciously accept as a fair consequence for being black. To them, justice had been done.

The guilt of a black person in America is so readily acceptable that trials are often a formality. Studies are catching up with the truth revealing, for example that the number of white drug offenders far outnumbers black drug offenders, but the number of black people incarcerated for drug offenses far outnumbers whites incarcerated for the same. The Innocence Project, dedicated to proving the innocence of the those wrongly convicted has successfully had 298 wrongful convictions overturned through DNA since 1989. Of those, 180 were of wrongly convicted blacks.

If Trayvon Martin had not been shot, there would have been another course of events on the night of February 26. The police would have arrived and they would have stopped Martin, questioned him, and possibly detained him. Martin would have come away alive, but  undoubtedly humiliated by a police department with a history nonresponse in the case of assaults on its black residents. This story would never have made it to TV news or Facebook. Yet the routine apprehension of young black boys it is still a real possibility for the only reason that they are black. And still certain people, the types of who would never read this piece would want to doubt the uneven meting of American justice. It's no joy to have the Trayvon Martin case to prove them wrong.