In black and white

From Royal Wedding (1951). Via.

Throughout the George Zimmerman trial people have been arguing from the counterfactual: suppose Zimmerman was black, or suppose the situations were reversed; and claiming that we ought to generalize our reaction from there to the real case—for instance if we think Black Zimmerman could be innocent, then we must accept it for White Hispanic Zimmerman. Zimmerman's lawyer, Mark O'Mara, even suggested that his whiteness was his crime:

"I think that things would have been different if George Zimmerman was black for this reason. He never would have been charged with a crime."

Referring, no doubt, to Florida's pervasive anti-white sentiments. Hm.

But there's something fraudulent about this thought experiment: nobody's imagining it all the way.

It's easy enough to imagine a white Trayvon. Skinny kid, sufficiently smart and good-looking, but maybe acting out a little after his parents' breakup, gets into a little trouble [jump]
at school; spends a lot of time on the phone; likes to eat junk calories and watch basketball. Who doesn't know this kid already? Black George is another matter.

The real George calls himself "Hispanic" because his mother comes from Peru—though it's a country better known for its contribution to Simon and Garfunkel than to salsa, if you know what I mean; it has little connection to or contact with US Latino culture. The mother also had an Afro-Peruvian grandfather, so young George would in fact not be a white man by the "one-drop" rule (then again, neither would most white South Africans; and I assume the same goes for white US southerners). I'm pretty sure he is one of the 53% of Hispanic Americans who identify as white (that's what all the respectable reports, in news organs that do fact checking, called him, to the rage of the unhinged right, who can't bear the thought of sharing a race with a bunch of Spanish speakers), and he is perfectly entitled to do so—these categorizations have to do more with how people see themselves than with absurd 19th-century ideas about "blood".

As soon as he moved into the Retreat at Twin Lakes in the summer of 2009, according to the marvelous story in the Tampa Bay Times (now well over a year old), he started calling the cops:

Aug. 26, 2009: "Male driving with no headlights on."

Sept. 22, 2009: "Yellow speed bike doing wheelies."

Oct. 23, 2009: "Aggressive white and brown pit bull."

The transcripts of Zimmerman's 911 calls during the more than two years he lived on Retreat View Circle fill 28 pages. His concerns include everything from the driver of a pickup cutting off people to a neighbor leaving his garage door open.

There were really crimes taking place in Twin Lakes (three burglaries), associated, people thought, with the national housing crisis, which had left home values plummeting from $250,000 to $100,000. Too many owners had lost too much; too many residents were now renting (including George Zimmerman and Brandy Green, Tracy Martin's girlfriend), and you couldn't trust them to be responsible about who came in and out of the Retreat. George Zimmerman's 911 calls became less about miscellaneous troubles and more about black males—and not wearing hoodies:

Aug. 3, 2011: "Black male with white tank top and black shorts … (Zimmerman) believes subject is involved in recent (burglaries) in the neighborhood."

Aug. 6, 2011: "Two black males, one wearing black tank top … are near the back gate of the neighborhood."

That's when, in September, residents started up a Neighborhood Watch group.

"Some residents called me wanting to do a startup," said [Wendy] Dorival, a civilian police employee. About 30 people came to the clubhouse for that first session, she said. "Everyone was enthusiastic." Zimmerman volunteered to be captain.

"I told them, this is not about being a vigilante police force," Dorival said. "You're not even supposed to patrol on neighborhood watch. And you're certainly not supposed to carry a gun."

George Zimmerman, however, was patrolling, and carrying a gun. More burglaries, or at least attempted burglaries, and bicycle thefts, and assaults, were reported. Trayvon Martin came to spend some time chilling out of trouble at Brandy's house.

How does Black George get to that point? I have no problem seeing him concerned about the neighborhood and joining the watch group.

But does he have a gun? There's a marginal group of law-abiding African Americans committed to gun ownership, according to Huffington Post, but they mostly live in most segregated inner cities, not a suburban settlement like the Retreat. Most middle-class A-A people seem to associate guns with gangbangers, crackers, out-of-control cops, and (if they're old enough) the real Black Panthers (as opposed to the costumed clowns who so frightened the Bush Department of Justice). In other words, they're typical liberals, like me, and don't trust that very dangerous hardware.

Inversion reaction. From Active Learning in Chemical Engineering.

And does he really stalk his subject, at a terrified remove, rejecting the good advice of the 911 responder, until the kid is so creeped out, perhaps, as to confont him? I just can't see it: it's such a creepy-ass cracker thing to do! It's TV comedy, from Don Knotts in dear old Mayberry to Rainn Wilson in the Scranton office! And even the ending is a kind of nightmare comedy, with the fat man supine, wriggling the gun out of his pants, and perhaps screaming at the top of his lungs as he does so? Although I've never believed he was screaming: to me it's always the kid, suddenly realizing that this crazy fucker is going to kill him, that this is his last moment of life.

Is it Black Trayvon or White Trayvon? It doesn't matter. Of course Black George isn't going anywhere near White Trayvon if he has any expectations of violence—not because he's afraid of the skinny kid; his first thought is of what he would tell the police, if anything happened. Pace Mr. O'Mara, Black George is rightly afraid of the Florida authorities. But I think if he comes close enough to Black Trayvon it's a sign of confidence as well: maybe to give him a Bill Cosby lecture about hitching his pants up and not loitering around in the rain like a damn fool. Either way, if he's not calm, he surely stays in the car.

If you alter the race parameter, it just doesn't happen: nobody dies. In that sense O'Mara was right—Black George wouldn't have been charged with a crime, because he wouldn't have committed one.

I got an idea of why some people like to talk about "what if Zimmerman was black" and so on from the brilliant Nima Shirazi, who parallels it to the question of why Israeli governments love to ask "what if we blew up a bus in Nablus, wouldn't Palestinians have a right to respond?" and so forth:

.@stahlidarity 2. reasons why Zimmerman & Israel escape justice is essentially identical. Inverting identities of victim & aggressor is key.
— Nima Shirazi (@WideAsleepNima) July 14, 2013

It's because we have to imagine a case where the aggressor really is the victim—where Black Trayvon shoots White George, where Palestinians put western Jerusalem under siege and starve the residents—to make ourselves imagine that the actual aggressor could be the victim—like filming Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling, only without any charm.

My own summary of the inversion:

@KaylaWildflower @KathrinOutLoud @jylicious Absolutely, why didn't Trayvon plead self-defense? Oh wait, he couldn't. He was dead.
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 14, 2013