The View from Flyover Country

by Sarah Kendzior

  Trayvon Martin is dead and the man who killed him walks free. Americans are afraid there will be riots, like there were after the King verdict in 1992. But we should not fear riots. We should fear a society that puts people on trial the day they are born. And after they die.

  Recession-fueled Racism

  The Trayvon Martin trial was not supposed to happen. This is true in two respects. The Trayvon Martin trial only took place because public outrage prompted Florida police to arrest George Zimmerman, the man who killed him, over a month after Martin’s death. The Trayvon Martin trial took place because that same public went on to try Martin in his own murder, assessing his morality like it precluded his right to live. It was never a trial of George Zimmerman. It was always a trial of Trayvon Martin, always a character assassination of the dead.

  Over the past few decades, the U.S. has turned into a country where the circumstances into which you are born increasingly determine who you can become. Social mobility has stalled as wages stagnate and the cost of living soars. Exponential increases in university tuition have erased the possibility of education as a path out of poverty. These are not revelations—these are hard limitations faced by most Americans. But when confronted with systematic social and economic discrimination, even on a massive scale, the individual is often blamed. The poor, the unemployed, the lacking, are vilified for the things they lack.

  One might assume that rising privation would increase public empathy toward minorities long denied a semblance of a fair shot. But instead, overt racism and racial barriers in America have increased since the recession. Denied by the Supreme Court, invalidated in the eyes of many by the election of a black president, racism erases the individual until the individual is dead, where he is then recast as the enemy.

  Trayvon Martin was vilified for being Trayvon Martin. If he were considered a fully human being, a person of inherent worth, it would be the U.S. on trial. For its denial of opportunity, for its ceaseless condemnation of the suffering, for its demonization of the people it abandons, for its shifting gaze from the burden of proof. The Trayvon Martin case only sanctioned what was once tacit and disavowed: A young black man can be murdered on perception. A young black man becomes the criminal so that the real criminal can go free.

  Americans should not fear riots. They should fear a society that ranks the death of children based on their race. They should fear a society that shrugs, carries on, and lets them go.

  A Tragedy

  A friend of mine on Facebook posts updates from a website called “Black and Missing but Not Forgotten.” The site exists because the default assumption is that a missing black child will be forgotten. It exists because the disappearance of a black child is considered less important than the disappearance of a white child. It exists because a large number of Americans have to be reminded that black children are human beings.

  In June, the Supreme Court invalidated part of the Voting Rights Act, stating that “our country has changed,” implying that discrimination against African Americans was a thing of the past. In May, the city of Chicago shut down public schools in which the majority of students were black. In April, a black high school student, Kiera Wilmot, was prosecuted as an adult after her science project exploded. In February, The Onion called nine-year-old black actress Quvenzhané Wallis an extremely vulgar name. The U.S., which proclaims racism a thing of the past, abandons and vilifies black children.

  Many Americans of many races will be outraged that George Zimmerman has gone free. They will advocate for tolerance and peace. This is a noble sentiment, but what the U.S. needs is a cold, hard look at social structure. We need to examine and eliminate barriers to opportunity, some of which are racially biased in an overt way, but many of which are downplayed because they are considered ambiguous social issues—such as decaying public schools, low-wage labor, and unemployment, which affect African Americans at disproportionate rates.

  Trayvon Martin was murdered before we could see what kind of person he would become. But the truth is, he had a hard road ahead of him no matter what he did. He would have confronted an America of racial and class barriers that even the most ambitious young man cannot override without a good deal of luck.

  In a U.S. of diminished opportunities, luck is nothing to bank on. Neither is hope, or dreams, or the idea, espoused by President Obama, that for young black men, “there’s no longer any room for excuses.” Trayvon Martin shows that there is plenty of room for excuses. There is even more room for social and economic reform, for accountability, and for change.

  Above all, there is room for responsibility. The death of Trayvon Martin is a U.S. tragedy. He was part of a broken system we all experience, but that black Americans experience in ways white Americans cannot fathom. The children who grow up like Trayvon Martin, discriminated against and denied opportunity, are everyone’s responsibility. Providing them a fairer, safer future should be a public priority.

  Americans should not fear riots. They should fear apathy. They should fear acquiescence. They should not fear each other. But it is understandable, now, that they do.

  —Originally published July 14, 2013

  St. Louis’s Sons, Taken Too Soon

  There is a park near my house in St. Louis where I walk every day. To get there I walk past empty stores and vacant lots, past a brick whitewashed church onto which the proprietor painted decorative windows to make it look like the kind of place it could be if anyone around here had money.

  The park is always busy. Families hold barbecues, children climb trees, young men shoot baskets, fathers coach sports. Almost everyone who goes to this park is black. When I walk through the park, white policemen ask me if anyone is bothering me. When I walk through the park, black men preface inquiries for directions with the phrase “Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Those are the assumptions that come from living in St. Louis. Sometimes they are spoken, but usually they are just felt.

  At the far end of the park there is a teddy bear and a balloon tied to a tree. They were left there to commemorate a twenty-year-old man who was shot and killed in July. Makeshift memorials like this line the landscape of St. Louis. They remind passersby that the person who died was someone’s son: not an archetype or a statistic or a threat, but a son.

  Those the public are taught to fear are often the ones in danger.

  The shooting happened near a high school reunion in late July. It had nothing to do with the reunion, an annual park affair attended by enthusiastic graduates of a 90 percent–black public school system. The shooting, which took place in another part of the park, seems to have been the violent outcome of a private feud.

  But around St. Louis, on the Internet, the chatter began. On websites, white St. Louisans speculated on the inherent danger of such a large gathering of black citizens. They stated again and again that they were not surprised.

  A shooting in St. Louis is never surprising, but it will always be shocking: that the cruelty of the act is complemented by the callousness of the reaction; that when a community cries, someone always finds a way to give it more to grieve.

  Decades of Violence

  When Michael Brown was shot, many of us in St. Louis heard about it on the Internet before we saw it in the news. I saw it on the Instagram account of Tef Poe, a rapper and writer who has emerged as one of St. Louis’s many black activist leaders. He posted a picture of a man, Brown’s stepfather, holding a cardboard sign that read: “Ferguson police just executed my unarmed son.”

  It took hours for the media to report on the story. Initial reports from the local paper referred to the gathering of a crowd outside where Brown’s body laid in the street for four hours as a “mob reaction.” They retracted that description as momentum grew, as a casualty so horrifyingly common became recognized as the crisis it was.

  If you had asked whether the killing of Brown would become an international cause or be swept silently aside, most would have bet on the latter. It is a testament to b
lack St. Louis activists, and their ceaseless documentation and calls to action, that it was not.

  No one will forget the killing of Michael Brown. But that killing was preceded by decades of police brutality, of violence, of losses, of teddy bears tied to trees. During the 2013–14 school year, seventeen St. Louis public school children died, a record number. The second largest number, in 2010, was eight.

  “At some schools, kids don’t come back to school for several days when a young person has died in the kind of violent death that occurred last night because they think there may be repercussions,” a St. Louis school superintendent told local media in March, after an eleven-year-old black boy was shot through the window of his home.

  By spring, trauma counselors were working overtime. Now, after the death of Brown and the tear-gassing of the local population, including children, they work around the clock.

  St. Louis was grieving long before the tragedy of Ferguson—or, at least, parts of it were. Like everything else in St. Louis, grief is unequally allocated. This is a city where people live their whole lives seeing certain neighborhoods only on TV.

  St. Louis is a city where black communities are watched—by police, by spectators—more than they are seen, more than they are heard.

  Healing St. Louis

  At my daughter’s bus stop in St. Louis, the children would play games. They would chase each other and run, laughing and screaming, through neighbors’ yards. “You better watch it,” one child called to another. “I’m going to call the police. And it doesn’t matter what you do. They’ll put you in jail for nothing.”

  A white classmate asked the boy, who was black, what he meant. He said that had happened to his uncle. The white boy looked at the black boy blankly. You can live next to your neighbor and still exist in a different city, with different rights and rules. You can greet each other with sincere warmth, and never fathom the disparity of experience.

  In January, my daughter’s school held an event to celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They called it “MLK: Not a Day, but a Way.” We marched through the neighborhood, parents and children and local leaders, to show that the struggle against injustice was never over. But we all marched to different beats, to different histories, and it would have been foolish to pretend otherwise.

  In the auditorium, in a great public school that is, like so many primarily black St. Louis public schools, in danger of losing accreditation, we sang “We Shall Overcome.” My daughter clasped hands with a black boy, her partner in the after-school science club. They sang a few bars then lost the words, and began whispering to each other about the movie Frozen.

  It was a scene of childhood innocence that advocates of a post-racial society like to promote: a black boy and a white girl, sweetly holding hands. But like all childhood innocence, it is an illusion. That boy will find danger when he ventures into the world unless St. Louis—and all U.S. cities—changes its ways.

  There is a movement to heal St. Louis. For St. Louis to heal, we need to examine the deep wounds inflicted by decades of discrimination and distrust. We need to protect the young black men who are threatened but portrayed as threats. Michael Brown is one of St. Louis’s many sons taken too soon.

  —Originally published August 27, 2014

  The Freedom to Criticize Free Speech

  In the summer of 2012, thousands of people took to the streets to protest a perceived assault on their religion. Traditional values were under attack, the protestors claimed, thanks to the meddling antics of Westerners seeking to disparage conservative views. But in this deeply divided and staunchly sectarian part of the world, it was not long before a counterprotest emerged. Activists picketed the sites of the original demonstrations, condemning the first group’s actions as backward and inhumane. Media pundits from both sides spurred on the controversy, which dragged on for weeks, while politicians exploited it to their own advantage. Meanwhile, people from outside the region looked on in disdain. How could so much outrage be generated over something so trivial?

  I am talking, of course, about Chick-fil-A.

  Those wondering how the low-grade YouTube clip Innocence of Muslims managed to incite revolt would do well to remember that America spent the summer of 2012 having religiously motivated protests over a chicken sandwich. On June 16, Dan Cathy, the CEO of the fast food restaurant Chick-fil-A, announced that he opposed same-sex marriage on biblical grounds, saying that gay rights advocates were “inviting God’s judgment on our nation.” Cathy had donated millions in proceeds from Chick-fil-A to anti-gay activist groups, including groups who want to make “gay behavior” illegal.

  In July, gay rights advocates called for a boycott of the fast food chain, companies cut contracts for corporate tie-ins, and politicians contemplated a ban of the restaurant in several cities, with one mayor accusing Cathy of peddling “hate chicken.” Americans who shared Cathy’s views were outraged. On August 1, over 630,000 people showed up for “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day,” an event organized by conservative Christian politician Mike Huckabee to celebrate the restaurant’s willingness “to take a stand for the Godly values we espouse.” Two days later, gay rights activists held a “Chick-fil-A Kiss Day,” in which same-sex couples were encouraged to show affection at the chicken chains.

  Advocates of the Chick-fil-A boycott saw it as a matter of civil rights. They were not comfortable giving their money to an organization that donated it to groups that promoted discrimination. Those who opposed the boycott were largely conservative Christians who shared Cathy’s view that same-sex marriage is wrong. But that was not how they framed their argument. Instead, they presented it as a matter of freedom of speech.

  The Fine Lines of Speech

  According to the Chick-fil-A supporters, Dan Cathy’s constitutional rights had been violated. “Calling for the boycott … has a chilling effect on our 1st Amendment rights,” said Sarah Palin, adding that Cathy was getting “crucified” for “having voiced support for kind of that [sic] cornerstone of all civilization and all religions since the beginning of time.” One Virginia demonstrator, who admitted that she opposed same-sex marriage, said that the protest was “more about people frankly being offended that people are offended.”

  The United States has been said to have an exceptional free speech environment. From a legal perspective, that is true: racial insults, flag burning, and desecration of religious materials are all permitted by law. In practice, attitudes toward free speech are more diverse and complicated. The line between advocating for free speech and seeming to applaud what people say is often blurred, as is the line between censorship and condemnation.

  Chick-fil-A defenders like Palin believe that to call for a boycott against an organization that promotes hateful speech is to threaten freedom of speech as a whole. But while the politicians who argued against allowing Chick-fil-A in their cities may have overreacted, the protest was aimed at getting people to avoid an organization that encouraged intolerance. It was not aimed at preventing Cathy or others from expressing their intolerant views.

  To condemn hateful speech, or call for a protest against those who promote it, is itself a form of free speech. Announcing that you are offended when someone insults you or something you believe in is not an act of censorship. What person would refrain from issuing a rejoinder against those who insult him on the grounds that the right to insult precludes the right to defend? It is worth remembering this in light of Innocence of Muslims and the hostile rhetoric against those whom it offends.

  Shock and Offense

  On September 19, the French magazine Charlie Hebdo published cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad, including several in which he is depicted in lewd positions. Their justification: freedom of speech. “Freedom of the press, is that a provocation?” the editor of the magazine asked, adding that the images will “shock those who will want to be shocked.” The French government banned people from protesting the cartoons. They said they were protecting freedom of speech while denying c
itizens the right to demonstrate their disapproval.

  Shock and offense are not feelings people cultivate. They are spontaneous emotions that reflect a violation of a person’s sense of self. When someone is shocked or offended, it is natural that they would express it. Yet when Muslims offended by Innocence of Muslims or Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons do so, they are accused of being an enemy of free speech. There is no excuse for reacting to an insult with violence. But many Muslims who peacefully expressed their condemnation of views that are hateful to them have been lumped into the same category: “Why are Muslims so easily offended?” goes the refrain.

  Worse yet, the creators of the cartoons have been portrayed as heroes for mocking Islam in a country known for its hostility toward Muslim immigrants and fierce state protection of free speech provocateurs. Editorials around the world have lauded the magazine for its alleged bravery, with one author proclaiming, “If free speech means anything, it’s the right to say and publish things that other people find objectionable and irresponsible, even blasphemous.”

  Such a perspective confuses what free speech does with what free speech means. Free speech allows people to insult and berate each other, but that is not what most people want, and it is rarely what makes freedom of speech attractive to those who do not have it. Those forced to live in countries without free speech know that one of its greatest values is that it allows citizens to speak the truth about their position, to contest false depictions, to refute bias and slander.

  Free speech means not only the right to offend, but the right to defend. When Dan Cathy proclaims his prejudice against homosexuals, or Charlie Hebdo its hatred of Muslims, that is free speech. But when gay rights groups call for a boycott, and Muslims protest a cartoon or a movie, that is also free speech. Free speech does not mean deferring to people’s right to abuse you.

  The Ingredients of Free Speech