Zimmerman Trail: Don't Be Alone with that White Girl, Ever.

“But watch who you bring home, they see a black man with a white woman, at the top floor they gone come kill King Kong,” raps a laser focused Kanye West on his new song Black Skinhead.

I read it. I heard it. More than a few people thought women, mothers would convict, now acquitted murderer, George Zimmerman. They did not think race mattered. It does. Don’t forget the dichotomy of the helpless White woman and the menacing Black predator. In 2008, Lebron James posed mouth agape and beastly in stance, one arm around an off-kilter Gisele Bundchen. Vogue used the racially conscious picture to drum up publicity. America’s tongue wags for racism like a b-tch in heat. We love to use American slavery and racism for Hollywood dollars and media coverage, yet claim we live in a post-racial society or that we as Black people always play the race card. We know how much media and advertisement plays a part in selling us lipstick, blush, hair color, and Nair, but after Trayvon Martin’s case we ignore how we are also sold racism and White privilege.

Unfortunately and fortunately, my first experience of the fear White America has about me, a Black boy, dating a White girl was a lesson from my parents. I dated a White girl named Lauren; my mother’s message to me was “don’t be alone with that White girl, ever.” She feared for me. For she knew what Adrienne Kennedy wrote in her essay Grendel and Grendel’s Mother “Ever since I’d been an undergraduate at Ohio State there were few white women that I didn’t dislike. White women, I felt since the days of American slavery were instigators of racial cruelties and evil.”

Kennedy an esteemed Obie Award winning playwright for the 1964 play Funnyhouse of a Negro, and the 1996 June and Jean in Concert and Sleep Deprivation Chamber. She rights in the aforementioned essay “now both my sons were with white women. I’d searched for a way to rid myself of the conflicting torment I felt at seeing my sons with these women. I tried to write about this torment in my essay Letter to Flowers, then I started a murder novel in which both women were found dead in a garden in Virginia.”  Black women know their sons as victims of White women. While, White women have been taught Black men prey upon them. Have we forgotten how quickly we believed Susan Smith, Ashley Todd, and Boonie Sweeten when they claimed Black men harmed them physically or kidnapped them and their kids? In all these instances, it took months for the truth to come out. When women claim to be victims of crimes we tend to take them at face value; however, there is something historically present at work when White women continuously play on America’s fear of the Black man to frame them.  

In the instructions given to an all female-predominately White jury, the judge wrote:

however, to justify the use of deadly force, the appearance of danger must have been so real       that a reasonably cautious and prudent person under the same circumstances would have believed that the danger could be avoided only through the use of that force.

The judge was asking these White women, who have been conditioned to fear Black men and Black youth, to essentially convict themselves, their “reasonably cautious and prudent” self.