Jonah Goldberg wonders if there is a bubble surrounding elite blacks that leads them to be more concerned about white racism than black-on-black crime. It’s a potentially interesting question, but before we can get to that we have to pause and ponder why Goldberg is posing the question in the first place. The answer is that the right-wing is responding to the uproar over the Trayvon Martin case with confusion about why it is being treated as such a big deal. In their view, black kids are being murdered all over this country every day, largely by other black kids, and we rarely if ever see any stories about those victims. In their view, this indicates that the only thing driving the Trayvon Martin controversy is that the shooter was initially reported to be white, even though he is half-Peruvian.
This is the wrong way to think about this controversy. This case involves several layers of injustice. Most obviously, we know who pulled the trigger. Find me a case of black-on-black crime where the shooter has been identified and confessed but has not been arrested. If you find a case like that, then we can talk about why that case is not receiving any attention. But in the absence of such a case, black-on-black crimes are oranges to Trayvon Martin’s apple. Beyond the lack of an arrest, we have the way the police treated the investigation. They appear to have engaged in some witness tampering. They drug tested the corpse, but not the shooter. They made no effort to learn whether the victim lived in the neighborhood or to locate his parents. They didn’t use his cell phone to aid them. They didn’t collect key evidence, like the shooter’s clothing. They defended their decision not to prosecute by referencing the Stand Your Ground law that doesn’t seem to apply. They overruled the lead investigator who doubted the veracity of the shooter’s account and wanted to charge him with manslaughter. And they leaked damaging information about the victim that has no relevancy to the case. I probably haven’t covered every way in which this investigation was screwed up, but I think I’ve covered the biggest issues.
No one has suggested that Trayvon Martin was doing anything wrong. And he’s dead. Can a black boy be killed with impunity in this country?
Finally, this case is important because of how it happened and how the circumstances make black people feel about their level of security in our country. The boy was identified as suspicious on the basis of his race. The shooter had a pattern of asking people to look out for black boys. He referred to Martin as “these assholes” and as a “fucking goon” or “fucking coon.” Perhaps because Martin was talking on a cell phone through an ear piece he appeared to be acting peculiarly, but considering the racial animus of the shooter’s comments on the 911 call, it’s clear that his main suspicion was based on Martin’s appearance alone. People in the black community are accustomed to being treated with suspicion, but that doesn’t make it okay to assume every black kid you see is an asshole and a goon. For a man to make that determination and then go confront a black kid and wind up shooting and killing him, and then to face no legal consequences…?
Are we supposed to just shrug that off?
And, you know, it’s possible that the shooter started a fight that he wound up losing. Maybe he was getting his ass kicked. Maybe his head was being pounded into the sidewalk. Maybe he felt like his life was in danger. Maybe Trayvon was reaching for his gun. It’s possible that he really acted in self-defense in order to save his own life.
It would have been helpful if the police had treated the case as a homicide investigation instead of leaving evidence uncollected and cherry-picking statements from the witnesses. It would have been helpful if they had treated Trayvon Martin as a victim of homicide, looked at his phone and called his parents. But they didn’t do any of that.
What Goldberg is missing is that the outrage in this case has as much to do with how the police behaved as it does with the death of Trayvon Martin.
As for his larger question about black elites, he may very well be right that black teenagers in our ghettoes are more concerned about being the victim of black-on-black crime than they are with white racism, while black columnists for the New York Times have the opposite priority of fears. The problem with that observation is that it explains very little and it has absolutely nothing to do with the Trayvon Martin case.
