Sadness

Almost one week has passed since the verdict on the Trayvon Martin case was publicly announced. I refer to it as the Martin case because to me it was clear that the political, social and human condition of the victim, rather than that of the killer, was being tacitly disputed here. Many have noted that the no guilty verdict represents a legally just decision given the case presented by the prosecution. But that assessment presupposes that the jury of six women (five white and one minority) were indeed deliberating based on the case that both prosecution and defense staged. And that they indeed deliberated, namely grappled with the information and various sets of interpretation presented to them. And that they deliberated, in other words, willfully considering with care and attention the many intricacies of the case. Moved by emotions. But always guided by reason. I for one do not entertain such presuppositions.

Andrew Cohen's article in The Atlantic addresses the larger concerns undergirding the many presuppositions listed above, none of which I uphold: "Trials like this one can never answer the larger societal questions they pose. They can never act as moral surrogates to resolve the national debates they trigger." Thus, hoping and expecting that the trial redresses, even if just partially or imperfectly, the social ill that it had been committed on the person of Trayvon Martin (and his family and by extension the African American community) promised to be a forlorn quest from the start.

At the same time, nor will clintonesque national dialogues have any consequential effect in changing the material, including legal and political, conditions that have ushered the social tragedy that has been the Trayvon Martin case.

My posts usually dangle in more abstract territory, although no less real or meaningful for being abstract. This week I would like to step outside the universe of pressing abstraction to jot down some impressions that the case's culmination have assembled in me at once quickly and gradually. Many emotions and fragmented thoughts roamed in me as the specificity of what I felt and thought was swiftly taking form. The process was helped by reading writers I respect: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jelani Cobb; and listening to public political and social commentators I follow: Melissa Harris Perry. All of them amassed insights and words that have helped me to articulate my own thoughts about what was staged on Saturday, when the decision delivered and made public: a miscarriage of social and political justice, whose causes and incentives had been instituted over a century ago, and whose repercussions continue unabated today.

More to follow.