So long as we are stuck on nuance, it was not my assertion that Charles Pierce enjoyed the subject matter of his column or was happy with the outcome of the Zimmerman trial. What I wrote was in plain English and shouldn’t be misconstrued. I wrote that Mr. Pierce probably enjoyed writing his column. Why? Because it was a very cleverly constructed piece that allowed him to churn out his wrath is a righteous and satisfying way. I didn’t really want to pick a fight with Mr. Pierce and don’t want to escalate things needlessly, but he can save the wounded pride.
What’s more, in citing Juror No. B37, he failed to note how her comments basically supported my point. She sat in that courtroom and heard all the evidence, and our point of view about that evidence made almost no impression on her. Likewise, her point of view makes almost no impression on us. It’s like we can’t even hear each other.
The main thing about Pierce’s column that bothered me was that it had this causal logic that the outcome of the trial had empowered people to do things that they had not been able to do prior to the trial. In the narrowest way, Piece was right, in the sense that George Zimmerman would never have been able to walk-free with a gun again if he had been convicted. But he wasn’t just talking about Zimmerman. That was just the device he used to make his outrage clear. I don’t want us to blame the jury when we should be blaming the laws and the system the jury operated under.
The second thing that bothered me wasn’t specific to Pierce’s piece. But it is the utterly lopsided way that both sides tend to talk about this case. I am guilty of it, too. Juror No. B37 revealed a lot of things in her interview, some of which were pretty stunning. Some of it was stunning and yet right on point about how the two sides can’t hear each other. For example, she talked about how she thought George Zimmerman’s heart was in the right place and that he was too overeager to help people. He was so kind to his neighbor who suffered a home intrusion (the incident that inspired the Neighborhood Watch program) and he probably profiled everyone who came into the neighborhood because that’s what he considered to be his job at the head of the Watch.
That’s pretty far removed from how I see George Zimmerman, a man who has so far showed no sincere remorse for the innocent life he took. It definitely gives him every benefit of the doubt, and then some. But it’s a way at looking at race and crime that is shared broadly in this country. This juror appeared to feel worse about what happened to George Zimmerman than what happened to Trayvon Martin, which is very troubling, but her starting point is that profiling Martin was a completely legitimate thing to do because kids who looked like Trayvon inspired the Watch in the first place. She doesn’t live in Rachel Jeantel’s world and can barely even understand her spoken words. What kind of racism is this, really? Subliminal, subconscious, institutional, cultural?
I think it’s mainly ignorance. Lack of contact. Lack of talking. Lack of understanding of what it’s like to be under suspicion because of how you look. To her, the problem is crime. To us, the problem is a system where someone innocent can be hunted down and killed and the police don’t even arrest the murderer. And then when the murderer is finally arrested in the face of public outrage, they can’t be convicted.
Juror No. B37 made this problem clear when she said that a couple of the jurors wanted to convict Zimmerman of something but they couldn’t find anything available to convict him of. The jury instructions precluded them from punishing Zimmerman in any way. Juror No. B37 also made another point of mine when she said that she didn’t know if Trayvon went for the gun or not but that it did not matter because she believed it was Zimmerman crying out in terror. Game. Set. Match.
I don’t believe anything I’ve had to say on the verdict is at odds with what Ta-Nehisi Coates has been saying, except that I offered the opinion that a conviction could have been justified based on all the lies that Zimmerman told. Coates and I have had the same focus, which is that jury isn’t really to blame here so let’s not focus on them.
But, of course, now that Juror No. B37 has spoken out, there are some legitimate things to discuss about both her in particular, and the jury in general. I just don’t want everyone to go chasing that rabbit and forget that it’s almost impossible to convict someone if Florida for murder unless you have an eyewitness. Blaming Juror No. B37 for being clueless and insensitive, or nitpicking the prosecutors, is wasted and diverted energy.
I don’t have magic solutions, but we won’t get anywhere by just saying Juror No. B37’s views are fucked up and have no validity, nor will she change if no one teaches her to understand and respect our side of the story.
