Zimmerman again from New York Times-----香港歧視的聯想

The Truth About Trayvon

By EKOW N. YANKAH
Published: July 15, 2013

THE Trayvon Martin verdict is frustrating, fracturing, angering and predictable. More than anything, for many of us, it is exhausting. Exhausting because nothing could bring back our lost child, exhausting because the verdict, which should have felt shocking, arrived with the inevitability that black Americans know too well when criminal law announces that they are worth less than other Americans.



Lawyers on both sides argued repeatedly that this case was never about race, but only whether prosecutors proved beyond a reasonable doubt that George Zimmerman was not simply defending himself when he shot Mr. Martin. And, indeed, race was only whispered in the incomplete invocation that Mr. Zimmerman had “profiled” Mr. Martin. But what this case reveals in its overall shape is precisely what the law is unable to see in its narrow focus on the details.

The anger felt by so many African-Americans speaks to the simplest of truths: that race and law cannot be cleanly separated. We are tired of hearing that race is a conversation for another day. We are tired of pretending that “reasonable doubt” is not, in every sense of the word, colored.

Every step Mr. Martin took toward the end of his too-short life was defined by his race. I do not have to believe that Mr. Zimmerman is a hate-filled racist to recognize that he would probably not even have noticed Mr. Martin if he had been a casually dressed white teenager.

But because Mr. Martin was one of those “punks” who “always get away,” as Mr. Zimmerman characterized him in a call to the police, Mr. Zimmerman felt he was justified in following him. After all, a young black man matched the criminal descriptions, not just in local police reports, but in those most firmly lodged in Mr. Zimmerman’s imagination.

Whether the law judges Trayvon Martin’s behavior to be reasonable is also deeply colored by race. Imagine that a militant black man, with a history of race-based suspicion and a loaded gun, followed an unarmed white teenager around his neighborhood. The young man is scared, and runs through the streets trying to get away. Unable to elude his black stalker and, perhaps, feeling cornered, he finally holds his ground — only to be shot at point-blank range after a confrontation.

Would we throw up our hands, unable to conclude what really happened? Would we struggle to find a reasonable doubt about whether the shooter acted in self-defense? A young, white Trayvon Martin would unquestionably be said to have behaved reasonably, while it is unimaginable that a militant, black George Zimmerman would not be viewed as the legal aggressor, and thus guilty of at least manslaughter.

This is about more than one case. Our reasons for presuming, profiling and acting are always deeply racialized, and the Zimmerman trial, in ignoring that, left those reasons unexplored and unrefuted.

What is reasonable to do, especially in the dark of night, is defined by preconceived social roles that paint young black men as potential criminals and predators. Black men, the narrative dictates, are dangerous, to be watched and put down at the first false move. This pain is one all black men know; putting away the tie you wear to the office means peeling off the assumption that you are owed equal respect. Mr. Martin’s hoodie struck the deepest chord because we know that daring to wear jeans and a hooded sweatshirt too often means that the police or other citizens are judged to be reasonable in fearing you.

We know this, yet every time a case like this offers a chance for the country to tackle the evil of racial discrimination in our criminal law, courts have deliberately silenced our ability to expose it. The Supreme Court has held that even if your race is what makes your actions suspicious to the police, their suspicions are reasonable so long as an officer can later construct a race-neutral narrative.

Likewise, our death penalty cases have long presaged the Zimmerman verdict, exposing how racial disparities, which make a white life more valuable, do not undermine the constitutionality of the death sentence. And even the most casual observer recognizes the painful racial disparities in our prison population — the new Jim Crow, in the account of the legal scholar Michelle Alexander. Our prisons are full of young, black men for whom guilty beyond a reasonable doubt was easy enough to reach.

There is no quick answer for the historical use of our criminal law to reinforce and then punish social stereotypes. But pretending that reasonable doubt is a value-free clinical term, as so many people did so readily in the Zimmerman case, only insulates injustice in plain sight.

Without an honest jurisprudence that is brave enough to tackle the way race infuses our criminal law, Trayvon Martin’s voice will be silenced again.

What would such a jurisprudence look like? The Supreme Court could hold, for example, that the unjustified use of race by the police in determining “reasonable suspicion” constituted an unreasonable stop, tainting captured evidence. Likewise, in the same way we have started to attack racial disparities in other areas of criminal law, we could consider it a violation of someone’s constitutional rights if, controlling for all else, his race was what determined whether the state executed him.

I can imagine a jurisprudence that at least begins to use racial disparities as a tool to question the constitutionality of criminal punishment. And above all, I can imagine a jurisprudence that does not pretend, as lawyers for both sides (but no one else) did in the Zimmerman case, that doubts have no color.

Ekow N. Yankah is a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.

不再寫Zimmerman了，畢竟槍械及種族問題是美國本土的事，黑人大學教授撰文為自己人爭權益抱不平也屬正常。不過，他的論述是否持平卻是另一回事。我無意挑起種族歧視的論爭，但我接着下來要講同種同族的矛盾。

如果你上巴士，見到兩個座位，你會坐在「公仔佬」的旁邊抑或西裝友的旁邊呢？我想就算你自己是「公仔佬」，你也會選擇坐在西裝友身旁。如果你是OL，這選擇就更明顯，我們都在歧視「公仔佬」嗎？(「公仔佬」即紋身漢)

這種性質的歧視有何不妥？有何不可？

我們對「公仔佬」有一定看法，因為在某程度上，我們會聯想到黑社會、好人有限等，而不是藝術家。對他們敬而遠之，是極正常的看法。如果在街上有兩個人在遊蕩，一個是「金毛公仔佬」，另一個是標少，你認為PTU反罪案巡邏會搜誰的身？

故此Zimmerman關注生面孔的黑人青年，何足為奇？把Zimmerman 案說成典型的種族歧視情況，並不公道。在監獄裏黑人囚犯的比例高，不能因此推斷為司法不公，容易把黑人定罪所致。美國社會裏黑人較窮，社會地位較低，犯法的人較多，入獄的比例自然較高。以囚犯人數來證明種族歧視，毫無說服力。千萬不要搞錯，美國歧視黑人是不爭的事實，我只是講Zimmerman案不是可以利用來借題發揮而已。

在香港的歧視情況嚴重嗎？我不講「公仔佬」，不講外傭，只講「強國人」。我想香港人和大陸人屬互相歧視，而並非一面倒的香港人歧視大陸人。同宗同源，但社會文化迥異，雖然沒有美國黑白對比的強烈，也不遑多讓。