Let’s talk about race

I have had my share of involvement with stories of national significance involving race, from the slaying of a teen named Yusuf Hawkins in Brooklyn 23 years ago – and the resulting murder and hate crime trials that ensued – as well as aspects of the Central Park Jogger rape case, also in New York.

In later years I was centrally involved with coverage of an alleged lynching in Mississippi which turned out to be a suicide, and that state’s continued inclusion of the Confederate battle flag as its canton.

Here locally there are racial issues that have yet to be addressed, including the desire of some to see a better chance of a minority judge placed on the Terrebonne Parish bench. And there are those elements of local history for which spiritual reparation has yet to be made, and those are stories that I continue to tell.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated in his letter from the Birmingham Jail that “Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”

The acquittal of George Zimmerman, a former neighborhood watch member in a Florida community of criminal charges in connection with the shooting death of an unarmed teen named Trayvon Martin has fueled accusations of injustice, as often occurs in cases where race is a factor. Zimmerman is Latino and white and Martin was black.

Zimmerman was not on trial for a hate crime, however, but for the question to be decided, due to Florida’s somewhat unique “stand your ground law” of whether he was justified under its provisions, which weigh heavily in favor of the killer in such a situation.

Louisiana has a similar statute involving automobiles, the “shoot-the-carjacker” law, but it has not garnered this type of attention. Like much that happens here besides hurricanes , oil spills, alligator hunters and Mardi Gras, we don’t get all that much national notice.

We do get CNN and Fox, and people here like everywhere else have followed the Zimmerman case and talk about it.

Here as everywhere else there is predictable choosing of sides, with a lot of white people saying Martin was a punk and that a trial should not have been necessary for Zimmerman, and a lot of black people saying that the case is one in point for how the justice system does not work for minorities, and how being white is equivalent to having a license to kill.

Then there are all the other people, black and white, who are somewhere in the middle and are searching for how this case, in all of its ugliness from start to finish, can tell us something about ourselves that we can use to make a better future.

The discussions show me one undeniable fact, which is that America – from the bayous to the Bronx and from Miami to Monterey –has yet to have performed an important task.

We have yet to have a meaningful discussion on race, and why as a people we assess issues across racial lines as if we were a couple that went to the movie and talking later as if they had seen two different films.

Blacks talk about their experience to their families at their dinner tables and whites talk about their experiences the same way. Both groups speak of the issues by offering little but blame to the other side. And as any family counselor will tell you, that doesn’t work well.

In this community as others, the Zimmerman case can serve if nothing else as a catalyst for cross-racial discussion of how we all get along, what we think of each other and why, on a personal, one-on-one basis. The churches are a good place to start. Other community resources could certainly find ways to help.

But we must talk about why we see what we see in the ways that we do. We must talk about our feelings toward each other, about our perceptions of history local and global.

Perhaps then, on some distant day, we will be able to address bad things that happen with a true eye toward justice, while working on real solutions.

The greatest disservice the Founders did this nation was by sidestepping the problem of race by not compromising effectively on slavery. So many years later we must not be guilty of the same sin, which is silence.