nationalreview | He could have been me. I could have been
out on neighborhood watch in my community performing my duties on a
rainy night. It could have been me following a young African-American
male around in my neighborhood because I did not recognize him, and
because my neighborhood had been burglarized by young African Americans.
It could have been me lying beneath a young black man who was striking
my head against the concrete, my nose broken in a fight gone bad. It
could have been me that tragic, deadly night.
It could have been me facing criminal charges for doing nothing
illegal that night, presumed guilty of a crime I didn’t commit, and
presumed guilty of being a racist, even though I had not an ounce of
racism in me, and even though the way I lived my life was proof of that
assertion.
It could have been me who, after being acquitted by a jury of my
peers in a state trial that never would have happened but for the color
of my skin — not even the color of my skin, but what my name suggested
the color of my skin might be — soon became the target of an
investigation by the federal government.
It could have been me facing a media so hell-bent on turning me into a
monster that they said and did almost anything, including doctoring a
9-1-1 call, in order to turn me into something I wasn’t.
It could have been me who will live with the fact that my actions led to the taking of a young life.
It could have been me. I could have been George Zimmerman.
That was the part of President Obama’s speech I was waiting to hear
after his very good — but incomplete — speech about the Zimmerman case.
It is true that President Obama could have been Trayvon Martin. But it
is equally true that he could have been George Zimmerman.
That’s the thing about real empathy; you have to walk in the shoes of all people, not just the ones you agree with or relate to.
I was waiting for that part of the speech because President Obama is
uniquely qualified to give it. Because he is half white and half black,
just as George Zimmerman is half white and half Hispanic — just as most
Americans are half something and half something else.
Part of the speech given by President Obama was sensitive and filled
with the right kind of emotion and tone. The warehousing of young
inner-city males in prisons for low-level crimes is a tragedy and also a
national disgrace (one, by the way, that white Christian conservatives
are working hard to rectify). Disparity in sentencing is a real problem;
too many African-American males are sentenced far more stringently than
whites who commit similar crimes. And the president was right to talk
about the terrible disparity in unemployment rates between white people
and African Americans, and the particularly high rate of youth
unemployment in our inner cities. White people need to know more about
these facts, and President Obama was right to talk about those things.
