In central Florida, where Trayvon Martin was gunned down, racism is all too commonplace.I grew up in Central Florida, not far from Sanford, where the killing of Trayvon Martin on Feb. 26 has garnered international attention. Martin was out in the evening walking to a store for some snacks, unarmed, when George Zimmerman, a local self-appointed neighbourhood watch captain, shot him after pursuing him on the grounds of his own personal judgment that Martin posed a danger. Martin’s body was kept overnight without any apparent effort to find his family, despite the fact that police possessed his cellphone. Zimmerman claimed self-defence and has yet to be charged with a crime. Yet, a 911 distress call has a recording of the shooting and reveals that Zimmerman used a racial epithet to refer to Martin. The recording also reveals that Zimmerman pursued Martin after authorities asked him to stop, and includes what sounds like Martin begging for help before he the gun shots that ended his life are heard. Zimmerman had 80 pounds on Martin, and a gun. Martin had a package of skittles and an iced tea.
I don’t know George Zimmerman, but I know that the racist epithet he could be heard using on the 911 call – a four-letter word starting with “c” that I still find too painful to repeat – was, and is, the epithet of choice among white racists in the area. Dr. Martin Luther King’s name was often changed so that this word replaced “King.” In fact, I heard that phrase used in a conversation with someone from the area just a few weeks ago.
When I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, Central Florida was still a black and white world, with just a few exceptions. There was de facto segregation in the schools, the neighbourhoods, the shopping centres, the beaches, and the restaurants, not to mention the churches. I well remember my surprise when I saw a black family coming in to shop at the Sears store in my hometown for the very first time in 1970. Although the schools were peacefully desegregated when I was in the seventh grade, and the place known as “Coloured Town” no longer exists, today there continues to be de facto segregation concerning where people live, eat, and go to school. Some whites still avoid taking short cuts through African-American neighbourhoods, explaining that “they will kill you as soon as look at you over there.”
Florida is a funny state. It is sharply divided into three parts. South Florida is the part that most folks outside of Florida associate with the state, with its tropical weather, cultural diversity, and a service-based economy centred on tourism. But the tropics does not extend up to Sanford: In Central Florida, north of Palm Beach, there is regular frost in the winters, altering the species of trees and flowers, and turning the oranges sweet (for sweet oranges, you need, as we used to say, “a cold snap”).
North Florida, by contrast, has always been part of the Deep South, with a plantation history and an agricultural economy. I moved to this part of the state when I went to college in 1973 at Florida State University, which was in Tallahassee, the state capital. African-Americans that I went to FSU with at that time were not too young to have grown up in places where they were let out of school early – and we are talking about public schools – so that they could work the fields. The sheriff of Tallahassee was often quoted in those days as saying that he liked his women like he liked his coffee: “sweet, white, and hot.”
In Tallahassee, I lived for two years in a cheap basement apartment in a rare integrated neighbourhood, midway between FSU and Florida A&M, the historically black university in town. Our white landlord told us, with pride, how he had taught his dogs to bark when black people walked by. He kept a gun loaded for shooting squirrels, he said. We wanted to move, but the rent was cheap and the landlord’s way of thinking was commonplace.
Central Florida, where Trayvon Martin lived and died, has always been
a mix of South Florida and North Florida economies and cultures, strong
in the service-based economy of tourism but rife with both anti-black
and anti-Latino racism. Rednecks were self-identified and proud in my
white-dominated high school. They were the linemen on the heralded
football teams, thick necked, short haired, and destined to join the
police force. But “nice girls” from upper-middle-class white families
were just as likely to use the n-word and c-word, in my experience. It
was more often the working-class white girls who crossed the colour line
to have black boyfriends.As I did myself, sometimes with harrowing results. As a light-skinned half-white, half-Latina, I often passed as simply white, certainly from a distance. I remember one sunny summer afternoon when a boyfriend and I took a rowboat out to cruise a lake. We soon came to realize, however, that with our boat in the middle of the lake, we could be seen by anyone and everyone. We pulled off at one point, to take our necking to the next level, when a guy in a pickup truck showed up and got out with his rifle. My friend and I cowered behind the reeds listening to him mutter about shooting us while he scoured the lake’s surface to see where we might have gone. Our relationship ended that afternoon.
Trayvon Martin was shot and killed because he went out walking in a neighbourhood George Zimmerman thought he had no legitimate reason to be in. Zimmerman was not charged because the local police found his actions completely intelligible and reasonable. The police did not attempt to locate Martin’s family because they didn’t give a damn.
When I return to Central Florida these days, I often bemoan how much the place has changed: more people, more traffic, more buildings on the beach. I realize, now, it has not changed enough.
Original Article
Source: the mark news
Author: Linda MartÃn Alcoff
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