Trayvon Martin: Articulation or Intersectionality in
Control-Freak Societies?
By Dr. Biko Agozino
Professor of Sociology and Director of Africana Studies,
Virginia Tech
‘When I heard about the Trayvon
Martin case, I thought that the real killer is the media that criminalizes
black youth, black men and black people…. No one talks about the media
spreading the poison that black people are dangerous to the extent that we do
not see people as people but as trouble. Incarceration of the killer is not the
solution if we fail to reeducate our people to recognize our common humanity.’
– Mumia Abu-Jamal, Plenary conversation with Angela Davis at the Manning
Marable Memorial Conference, St John’s Cathedral, Columbia University, April
2012.
We live in authoritarian societies that are best described
as control-freak societies. The control-freak ideology goes beyond the claim to
a monopoly of force and violence by the state to include the authoritarianism
of ordinary citizens who often internalize what Jacques Derrida (who observed
that the word for justice and violence, Gewalt, is the same in German language)
called ‘the force of the law’ and take it upon themselves to ‘enforce’ justice
with emphasis on a final solution over not only total strangers but also over
otherwise beloved family, friends and colleagues. As Mumia implied above, the
control-freaks include scholars and journalists who spread the gospel of zero
tolerance in otherwise democratic societies where tolerance should be taught
more.
The control-freak state cheer-leads the lethal
authoritarianism of private individuals and security corporations as ‘natural
right’ by reinforcing ancient laws of self-defense that gave people the right
to kill others in defense of their private property as if property is more
valuable than human life or as if life is only another form of property in a ‘commercial
society’: now only a vague ‘feeling’ of being threatened after ‘a series of burglaries’
in a gated community is enough to encourage a vigilante to follow an innocent
youth on his way to his father’s residence and gun him down self-righteously.
The police appeared to encourage this type of outrage by initially refusing to
even arrest and charge the confessed murderer (not killer as the media would
have it, he was finally charged with second-degree murder, not with killing)
obviously because the life lost was that of a black male homo sacer, a disposable human being, as Zygmunt Bauman put it in Modernity and the Holocaust.
Most commentators on the case of Trayvon Benjamin Martin saw
it as a case of the all too familiar fruit (no longer a ‘strange fruit’ with so
frequent a recurrence) from the tree of racial profiling but it is much more
than racial in character. Stuart Hall will always remind us to look beyond
racism in situations like this and understand that it is the result of the
articulation on race-class-gender relations in societies structured in
dominance. In the US, the preferred theory is that of Kimberley Crenshaw on
race-class-gender intersectionality.
The two theories are similar but not identical given that,
according to Crenshaw, the intersections of streets or the intersections of
circles could be used as metaphors with which to capture race-class-gender
intersectionality while Hall prefers to use the analogy of the articulated
train or lorry in conjunction with the linguistic concept of giving expression
to underscore the fact that the exploitation of cheap black labor in South
Africa, for instance, was not simply racist, sexist or classist but an
articulation, dis-articulation and re-articulation of all three simultaneously as relations that are never separate, though different.
The analogy of streets or circles intersectionality fails
this test of simultaneity because of the assumption that Trayvon Martin may
have been walking on the ‘gender’ street (or circle) safely until he came to
the point where that street or circle intersected with the ‘race’ and ‘class’
streets or circles whereas the theory of articulation assumes that there is no
inch of the street or circle that is not always already racialized, gendered
and class-specific; emptiness lies outside the intersectionality. In other
words, race-class-gender ‘overlapping’ is closer to the reality of
race-class-gender articulation than the mechanical metaphor of the intersection
would have us believe.
When George Zimmerman confessed to the murder of Trayvon
Martin, he did not go to one police precinct to enjoy the privileges of his
masculinity, then to another to celebrate his Hispanic whiteness, before going
to a third to perform his respectable middle class-ness in ways that would not
hold if it was the truck driver father of Martin that had shot the son of
Zimmerman the ex-judge even after the police dispatcher warned him to ‘stand
his ground’ and desist from following the youngster. At the very least, a black
man who murders an innocent white teenager will be arrested on the spot and asked
to save his self-defense excuses for the jury. Respectable white male privilege
and an enabling legal environment that devalues poor-black-male lives added
insult to this injury. Similarly, when Trayvon was unjustly profiled, his
blackness was not seen as threatening on one street before his maleness became
an issue on another street and before his walking-rather-than-driving poverty
status became an issue on yet another street or at the intersection of all
three.
The point here is that authoritarianism is very popular in
control-freak societies as is evident in the fact that after a few weeks of
appealing for funds online, the confessed murderer raised over $200,000 for his
defense and for his ‘personal expenses’ while an online gun shop that offered a
shooting target in the image of Trayvon Martin said that the image sold out
within two days despite some public outrage. It is this popularity of
authoritarianism that encourages families to send their youth to go and kill
and be killed in foreign lands just because those in authority asked them to do
so and the escalation in street violence frequently correlates with periods of
foreign wars and invasions. For instance, the involvement of Norway in the
invasion and bombing of the Trayvon Martins in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya probably incited
the white-supremacist into massacring 77 people in Oslo and just like
Zimmerman, he claimed self-defense for the atrocity.
This very same bloody control-freak populism encourages
parents to brutalize their own children in the name of discipline even when the
authoritarian state would hesitate in the cases of babies too young to know any
better. Friends and neighbors, lovers, brothers and sisters, employees and
employers, students and teachers all buy into this control-freak ideology that
is alien to the African philosophy of non-violence which we need to
rehabilitate as part of the solution rather than leave it to remain battered
and bruised, accursed and ridiculed by imperialist reason.
Angela Davis followed the above epigraphic teaching from
Mumia Abu-Jamal during the constantly interrupted 15 minute collect-phone call
from a control-freak prison with a highlight of the lesson we can all learn from
the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission: A widow was asked by
Desmond Tutu if she would ever forgive the police officer who murdered her
husband and she responded that she would only forgive him if he will do three
things: identify the ground where the corpse was burnt so that she could gather
it and bury her husband; accept to become her son; and come and visit her
family regularly to understand that the person he killed was a valued human
being. On hearing this, the killer collapsed and fainted. Angela concluded by
advising against the atomization of Trayvon Martin.
What Mumia and Angela suggest above is that the African
philosophy of non-violence which Mahatma Gandhi claimed that he learned from
the Zulu during his sojourn in South Africa and which Martin Luther King Junior
suggested that he learned from Gandhi, a philosophy that was an essential part
of the successful resistance against slavery, colonialism, sexism, class exploitation,
and apartheid by people of African descent and their allies and by all those
other colored people who adopted this philosophy, should be an essential part
of the solution that we seek.
In other words, the injustice done here goes beyond the
murdered youth to encompass the murderer who sleeps no more because he has
murdered sleep. Racism-sexism-classism as the articulation of injustice is a
multiple-edged sword that cuts the aggressor as well as the aggrieved but to
different extents. This is probably why a carefully staged apology was
volunteered by George Zimmerman to the parents of Trayvon Martin prematurely at
the bail bond hearing – a clear indication that he had realized that he ruined
his own life too due to the hate and fear that he was raised with when he could
have been safer with love in his heart for all. His intolerance is widely
condemned by people of all races, classes and genders.
When the Nazis were driven into a genocidal hatred by the
control-freak state, little did they know that for each Jew who was killed, at
least three Germans would pay with their lives. When the Hutu tried the final
solution on their Tutsi brothers and sisters, little did they know that the
media broadcasts urging them to kill all the ‘cockroaches’, including the young
ones, would result in the Hutus themselves being dehumanized as well and Rwanda
has responded mainly with reconciliation and healing rather than the obsession
with revenge and Beccarian fantasy of making the punishment fit the crime given
that no punishment would ever fit the crime. Responding to the atrocity in
Norway, Nils Christie wrote that we should learn to love all and seek to punish
less because punitive-mindedness escalates hate and vengeance without being
able to heal the original wounds.
In conclusion, while we all must continue to organize for
social justice, we should recognize the humanity of the aggressor rather than
profile him as a monster. As Mumia suggested in a tone reminiscent of Martin Luther
King Jr., we should direct our agitation more at the institutions that
normalize the oppression of our people and insist on the transformation of such
institutions through the non-violent means of mass protests and ballot measures.
We can also challenge the gun lobby with the jurisprudence of big tobacco: when
you make a defective product that kills thousands of people annually, the
manufacturers and the gun-lobby should be made to pay some reparations to the
bereaved.
Since (black) people are increasingly afraid to walk along
their own streets, close-circuit television cameras should be installed on streets
in neighborhoods that vote to have them and the images should be accessible
through a public television channel where we can all see that it is dubious
that a dead child banged the head of the aggressor against the sidewalk before
being executed in cold blood (CCTV could show that his alleged wounds were
self-inflicted after the killing).
Finally, the drug laws that amplify the fear of young black
males should be abolished immediately while we use education to get our young
people to say no to drugs and use the healthcare system to minimize harm so
that no one is going to shoot another poor Black or Hispanic male youth on the
pretext that he looked as if he was on drugs and the control-freak justice
system would not be allowed to over-incarcerate poor young men on the suspicion
that they possessed small quantities of drugs and thereby expel them from
school, deny them job opportunities, exclude them from public housing and deny
them the right to vote even after serving their sentences as Michelle Alexander documented in The New Jim Crow.
President Barack Obama has shown courage in coming out in an
election season by ending the war in Iraq and by supporting same-sex marriage
for citizens who prefer that; it is about time he came out for ending the war
on drugs that has escalated the violence on our streets and homes while
contaminating otherwise law-abiding youth by sending them to prison where they
are likely to be recruited by violent drug gangs. If Trayvon Martin was not
suspended from school for alleged marihuana residues found in his school bag,
perhaps he would be at home in his mother’s black community of Miami Gardens rather
than be found in the red-neck garrison community of his father’s girlfriend in
Sanford where he may have been sent by his mother on the mistaken assumption
that it might be safer than the black neighborhood. The police autopsy report
revealed that he had THC in his blood and urine but we are not told what
substances George Zimmerman had in his system to make him so paranoid about a
harmless youth on that fateful day.
Let us force the politicians to decriminalize drugs and control
guns by sustaining the mass protest that Trayvon Martin’s murder and attempted
impunity eventually inspired. Let us take the Occupy Movement beyond Wall
Street and Occupy the Prison Industrial Complex with marches, pickets and
teach-ins until funding is made available to teach love and tolerance in all
schools and until the political prisoners are freed along with the drugs war
prisoners. President Obama took a step in this direction by reducing the
crack-powder cocaine disparity from 100:1 to 10:1; we need to make him see the
logic of his South American colleagues who are calling for an end to the war on
drugs that has resulted in the death of 50,000 Mexicans in the few years that
they had a drug-war lord for president while implicating US officials in the scandalous
shooting of two pregnant women and two men on a boat that was wrongly suspected
of transporting drugs in Honduras recently. Only the increased democratization
of the entire world via decolonization from imperialist reason in accordance
with what Ron Eglash called African
Fractals - the fact of the interconnectedness of humanity - would result in
more peace and love as Hal Pepinsky argued in The Geometry of Violence and Democracy and as I did in Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of
Imperialist Reason.
Dr Agozino is the Chair of the Social Policy Committee of
the Association of Black Sociologists.
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