The impossible question: Why?

Terrence Heath, who is black, recounts when he was in college his father sat him down for The Talk. Nope, not the birds and the bees. This was a full blown course in Black Man 101 -- how to conduct yourself during encounters with police when you've done nothing wrong and are still accused. That is if you want to emerge alive and unscathed. The lessons included how to be deferential and agreeable while being treated like a criminal.

But with the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin, Heath remembers what his father had to do during Jim Crow.

The old rules required Blacks to be agreeable and non-challenging when dealing with white people, even if the white person in question was wrong. No Black person could never even insinuate that a white person was wrong, lying, or had dishonorable intentions. Under no circumstances was a Black person ever to even appear to assume equality with whites.

If a white person carrying a gun will feel threatened by a black man and may shoot with very little provocation, then Jim Crow etiquette is back. Black fathers must teach their sons to act around any white person the way they used to teach their sons to act around police.

Being a Black man of almost any age in American means being constantly aware of the fear your mere presence inspires some whites, the anger that follows closely on heels of that, and the deference required of you as a result. Should it cause you to be profiled, harassed, demeaned, beaten or worse, you may just have to take it. If, that is, you want to live.

We already teach our sons to follow a similar etiquette above with police officers. We tell them to be agreeable and non-challenging, even if the police are wrong.

Must we now explain to our sons that their very presence is enough to make some people believe they are dangerous solely because they are young black men? Must we now explain to them that some white people will look for any reason to act on those feelings and beliefs?

Must we revert to teaching our sons to conform to some modern form of “Jim Crow etiquette”? Must we now revert to teaching our sons to be deferential to every bigot who may be armed, and may have just enough law on their side to start shooting based on nothing more than how they feel and what they believe?

Last fall, our oldest son got his first hoodie. It quickly became his favorite article of clothing. The moment he put it on, and pulled the hood over his face, I saw Trayvon Martin’s face. I thought of my son in Trayvon Martin’s place.

Sometime during The Talk there is a question from the student that is impossible to answer: Why?



Joshua DuBois of Newsweek writes about the national mood after the Zimmerman acquittal. On the black side it is mothers asking in fear "Can they really just kill our kids?" And on the white side is another fear:

It’s a view that has sympathy for the Martin family, but at the end of the day also has sympathy for George Zimmerman: You know, sue me, but a tall, hooded black man that I’ve never seen before in my neighborhood is maybe a little frightening. And I don’t know what happened next between Zimmerman and Trayvon. But if, God forbid, I, or my husband, or my wife, is ever in that situation, I might like the right to ... Most would shudder to finish the sentence.

So how do we lessen the fear? DuBois has profiles of a couple people trying to do just that. The first is Russell Moore. He is the new head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. This is the denomination that fought hard to maintain slavery and Jim Crow and filled the ranks of the Klan. So, yeah, having a white guy in the leadership of that organization talking about how to heal the fear between the races is a really big deal. "Moore has made it a personal goal to understand the manifestations of racism in the American soul and root it out."

Moore says we are having two different conversations about race. Blacks tend to discuss it in broad terms. But they should be discussing being afraid their son will be the next Trayvon.

Whites tend to discuss the specifics -- how that particular black man frightens me. But they don't see the historical context. Whites don't see that blacks place Trayvon Martin alongside Medgar Evars. There needs to be a conversation and it needs to be at the local level and done with preparation.

Congressman John Lewis, who was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, felt ill when the verdict was announced. He adds:

You know, here is the key: to be made whole, we have to forgive George Zimmerman. We have to forgive those who believe that what he did was right. … Once we forgive, we can encourage the majority population to walk in our shoes—the shoes of a black mother, a black father, a black son, a black daughter. But first, we have to forgive.

Maya Angelou responds with hope:

Look at the people who are protesting! Look at the people who are standing up for their rights. These aren’t just black people or white people—these are right people. These crowds, some of them are 50, 60 percent white.

John Oliver is Jon Stewart's summer replacement at the Daily Show. He does a great six minute rant about the Zimmerman acquittal and the craziness of Florida law. A choice tidbit:

According to current Florida law you can get a gun, follow an unarmed minor, call the police, have them explicitly tell you to stop following [the minor] and choose to ignore that, keep following the minor, get into a confrontation with them, and if at any point during that process you get scared you can shoot the minor to death, and the state of Florida will say, "Well, look: you did what you could."