The Zimmerman verdict: Inside a juror's mind (2nd comment)

After George Zimmerman was acquitted of any crime in his killing of Trayvon Martin, the juror known to us only as "B-37" insisted that the case had nothing to do with race. She agreed that Zimmerman should have stayed in his car when he spotted Trayvon Martin sauntering home, rather than take matters into his own hands. But she said Zimmerman's "heart was in the right place": He was just trying to prevent further vandalism in his neighborhood, and he would have followed anyone who was "acting strange."

Juror B-37 also said that George Zimmerman needn't have testified, because subjecting him to cross-examination wouldn't have changed her mind about anything. This juror also dismissed everything Martin's friend Rachel Jeantel said simply because of her appearance and the fact that she seemed uneducated.

That reaction shouldn't surprise us. The jury expert hired by Zimmerman's defense team described B-37 as his dream juror; he expressed surprised that the prosecution didn't strike her from the list. B-37 certainly isn't alone in sympathizing and identifying with Zimmerman, not to mention failing to sympathize or identify with Trayvon Martin. Some of this lack of empathy is the prosecution's fault, for failing to effectively humanize Trayvon Martin. But the juror's basic attitudes surely existed before the trial.

"'Shut up about slavery'

After all, what is strange about walking home from a store? Nothing, unless you assume that black males are inherently suspicious. I don't think it even occurred to Juror B-37 that there was anything wrong with Zimmerman's assumption that an unfamiliar young black male was a potential troublemaker.

For black people, this juror is herself Exhibit A of a case we've been trying to make for some time: Our young men are considered both dangerous and dispensable.

A Facebook commenter a few days ago remarked, among other things, that black people should "shut the hell up" about slavery and that white people don't start riots. (Apparently she forgot the Boston Tea Party and New York City's draft riots during the Civil War.) She added that we're all human, by which she seemed to mean that black people shouldn't expect special treatment; after all, she said, why should there be a "Black History Month" if there's no "White History Month"? The whole point of Black History Month, of course, is that every month is White History Month.

Hope for the future

I'm grateful for her candor. This woman is indeed human, in the sense humans tend to assume that their experiences are the only ones that matter and to dismiss people who behave differently because they've been treated differently.

I heard an audio essay on National Public Radio by a young black man named Miles, who at 18 wasn't sure how to respond to the Zimmerman verdict. He concluded that his mother and grandmother had been warning him for years to vary his route home not because they were paranoid, but because he really is a potential target— even in 21st Century America, and even with a black man in the White House.

I asked my 16-year-old daughter, not deeply engrossed in current events (although this one caught her attention), what she thought about the Zimmerman verdict. "When the crabby older generation dies off, we'll be OK," she replied, "because our generation is different. Discrimination will always be here, but it's improving." That's the saving grace of the young: the conviction that things will change. In that belief lies society's best hope for a better future.♦


To read another commentary on the Zimmerman trial by Jackie Atkins, click here.
To read a response, click here.
To read a related commentary by AJ Sabatini, click here.