An unarmed teenage boy walks to a 7-11 to buy Skittles and an iced tea. On the way home, and inside the gated community where he was staying with relatives, he is pursued by a neighborhood watch captain who confronts him and then shoots him dead.
It happened in nearby Sanford, but this senseless and gut-wrenching tragedy has caused universal outrage. And it has mobilized the African-American community like nothing since the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
“How do we go from this moment to a movement that creates change?” the Rev. Jesse Jackson challenged at a local rally. “If it's a moment we go home. If it's a movement, we go to war.”
In a situation like the tragic killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, where right and wrong appear well-defined, it's difficult to look unwaveringly at causation. But the effort can reap unexpected dividends.
Just ask the gay community.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, AIDS was killing tens of thousands of gay men each year. There was no treatment, no cure, and people were terrified. Patients were quarantined and emergency medical providers refused direct contact. In some cases, gay men were forbidden from working in hospitals or handling food in restaurants.
Most infuriating, the federal government devoted few resources to the horrific and growing epidemic. Research grants languished in bureaucratic red tape. President Ronald Reagan never addressed the crisis publicly.
So LGBT activists took to the street with a desperate plea: our lives matter, too.
“We’re living through war, but where they’re living it’s peacetime,” cried author and playwright Larry Kramer. “And we’re all in the same country!”
This was the obvious message of the AIDS crisis; the obvious teaching opportunity. But courageous leaders like Kramer compelled us to examine further, and to our everlasting credit we rose to the challenge.
At first few wanted to consider that unprotected sex was the principal means by which HIV is transmitted. Bathhouses stubbornly refused to offer condoms or post warnings. All this speculation about HIV was anti-sex”just when it was starting to get fun.
“I am sick of guys who moan that giving up careless sex until this blows over is worse than death,” Kramer said. “How can they value life so little?”
But Kramer dug even deeper, crying out that neither sex nor HIV was the principal culprit of our demise”it was the closet.
“As more and more of my friends die, I have less and less sympathy for men who are afraid their mommies will find out or their bosses will find out,” he challenged. “Unless we can generate visible mass numbers, we are going to die.”
Slowly, attitudes changed. Condoms became ubiquitous. We learned to ask for safe sex. Non-profits sprouted to care for people with AIDS and offer HIV testing and counseling. And we began to take care of our own, through fundraising and volunteerism.
We discovered that Kramer was right: being gay isn't about sex, it's about self-respect. Things have been different ever since.
Similarly, the deepest lesson from the death of Trayvon Martin may also be unpalatable at first. Like AIDS and homophobia, it's obvious that the racist objectification of young black men as thugs is rampant in our culture and has tragic consequences.
“Black men wear a bulls-eye throughout their lives,” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote after Trayvon's death. “Their vital imperative is to never, ever, be caught on the wrong street at the wrong time.”
But as with HIV, there are more unsettling questions worth asking. Why are young black men stereotyped in the first place? And what can be done about it?
There are close to five million African-American men ages 15 to 29 in this country. According to U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics, more than 30% can expect to spend time in prison over the course of their lifetime. Thirty percent! That ravaging statistic has doubled in the past three decades, and coincides with equally troubling high rates of death, unemployment and school dropout.
The growing disenfranchisement of a large percentage of African American boys, and our culture's brick-like response, is an epidemic every bit as tragic and costly as AIDS. And as troubling as it is to confront, this epidemic is at least partially responsible for the stereotyping that placed an innocent Trayvon Martin in harm's way.
Like Kramer, Jackson invoked war to describe the rampant racial stereotyping that led to Trayvon's death. But if there's to be war, I hope it will also be against the devastating disenfranchisement of African-American youth in our country.
And I hope it's as successful as the still-evolving war on AIDS.
