"Loaded God Complex, Cock it and Pull It:" Dissecting the rooted racism of Stand Your Ground in the Death of Trayvon Martin

• In Event: The Politics of Stand Your Ground: Origins and Implications

Abstract

"In the Circuit Court of the 18th judicial circuit in and for Seminole Florida, the State of Florida versus George Zimmerman, verdict, we the jury find the defendant, George Zimmerman, not guilty.” With those words, an outcry of shock, disbelief, anger, and frustration traversed the world. Academics andnon-academics alike began to express a variety of emotions and reactions that were instructive, and provided extemporaneous ad hoc racial analyses particularly as it related to justifiable homicide generally, and Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground Law. Following the verdict, a variety of dialogues emerged that, while deriving through the instantiation of TrayvonMartin’s murder, spoke to larger issues of race, racial identity, andcross-racial dialogue in the American justice system experience. This paper seeks to bring together a cross-section of perspectives that address the state of race in the US as manifested in reactions, responses, and analysis of the Trayvon Martin murder. Specifically, this paper examines the Critical Race Theory perspectives of whiteness as property, the endemic nature of race and racism, as well as interest convergence in looking at differentiated applications of the law, based along racial lines, with respect to (justifiable) homicide. A hope of this session is that we can begin to “write the wrong,” or help to better understand how to address racial wrongs that this case, and many other racialized experiences, reveal. Since the election of President Obama, many white people believe that we have achieved a “post-racial” moment. What I argue in this paper is that not only are we not post-racial, but that race and racism are in many ways more prevalent in 2013 (and the last 5 years) than in any point in history, and race and racism are significantly visible within the context of US jurisprudence.

Author

• Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner, Louisiana State University