Last month, a 17-year-old black kid named Trayvon Martin was shot dead in a gated Florida community by a self-styled neighbourhood vigilante. The teenager, who was unarmed, had gone to the convenience store to buy some candy. Astonishingly, the police didn't bother to arrest the shooter, a 28-year-old white Hispanic named George Zimmerman. Mr. Zimmerman – who, by some accounts, chased the teenager down the street – said he'd acted in self-defence.
Trayvon's death was an outrage. But nobody paid much attention until Jesse Jackson took it up. Now the case has reignited all the bitter old debates about racism in America.
To many people, Trayvon's death is the modern-day version of a lynching. It's proof, if any more is needed, that racism is alive and well. Jesse Jackson called him a "martyr." Black leaders are comparing him to Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Chicago boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for supposedly whistling at a white woman. Al Sharpton accused the Sanford, Fla., police department of a "reckless disregard for black lives."
Even Barack Obama weighed in. How could he not? He refused to address the issue of lingering racism head-on. But he did frame the issue as a parent. "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon," he said last week. "I think all of us have to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen."
It would be naive to think race played no part in Trayvon's death. As every black American knows, racial stereotyping is a fact of life, and young black males in hoodies live under a constant cloud of suspicion. But the real villain isn't racism in America. It's Florida's noxious Stand Your Ground law – aided and abetted by an incompetent local police department that did nothing.
The Stand Your Ground law is a product of America's crazy gun culture. It allows anyone to shoot anyone else in "self-defence" if they feel threatened. Critics call it a licence to kill under a variety of suspect circumstances. More than 20 states now have such laws, which have been used to justify killings ranging from drug dealers' turf wars to lethal incidents of road rage. Since the law was introduced in Florida, the rate of justifiable homicides has tripled. Former Miami police chief John Timoney calls it a "recipe for disaster."
But when it comes to racial politics, the Stand Your Ground law is irrelevant. Black Americans and white Americans experience two different versions of reality. In one version, black men are stopped, frisked, shot and jailed in overwhelming disproportion to their numbers. "It's a feeling of being degraded," said former New York governor David Paterson, the first black to hold that job; he says he's been stopped three times by police. In the other version, the face of crime in America is overwhelmingly black on black. In New York City, according to a New York Times op-ed based on reports filed by victims in 2009, blacks made up 23 per cent of the population but accounted for 80 per cent of the gun crimes.
When Mr. Obama was elected President, many people hoped he would somehow help heal the racial wounds that have torn America apart. As the first postracial president, he would help the country grapple with racial disparities and divisions, and make headway on the issues of black poverty, joblessness and lack of education. Those hopes were naive. Unlike gun laws, deep-rooted social issues of poverty, discrimination and race can't be resolved with better legislation. Racial politics is embedded deep in America's DNA. And a postracial nation is still a distant dream.