Jonathan Capehart: Soul-searching and the killing of Trayvon Martin

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/soul-searching-and-the-killing-of-trayvon-martin/2011/03/04/gIQAH5DWaS_blog.html

Soul-searching and the killing of Trayvon Martin
By Jonathan Capehart


There are those perfect-storm moments that force us to see something we ignored, didn’t know about or didn’t think was our concern. It happened with HIV-AIDS when Hollywood leading man Rock Hudson died of the disease in 1985 and when basketball star Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive and was retiring from the sport in 1991. And it happened with sexual harassment of women in the workplace when Anita Hill testified against Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in October 1991.

Not so when it comes to race.

The issue is so fraught, so weighted with unattended baggage that discussions about the legitimate concerns and frustrations of whites and the double-standards and the limits on liberty faced by African Americans, and black males in particular, are never sustained, if not outright avoided.

The last time this nation was embroiled in a soul-searching conversation on race it was sparked by the arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his own home by a white police officer in July 2009. At the time, I wrote that “nothing” would come of it because we’ve seen this movie before. The racial flare-up leads to a week or two of soul searching and then we move on. But the killing of Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman feels different.

Sure, we are destined to move on. But judging by some of the powerful e-mails I’ve received in reaction to my post on the list of “don’ts” I received as a teenager and my television commentary on this tragedy, many Americans won’t be the same. For the death of an unarmed 17-year-old boy whose black skin and hoodie earned him the suspicion of a 28-year-old gun totting wanna-be cop was “epiphanous.”

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In that 2009 piece about the arrest of Harvard professor Gates, I asked whether we as a nation would listen to each other with an open mind to try to understand where the other comes from on matters of race. The reaction to the killing of Trayvon Martin has given me hope that America has a new understanding of a perennial fear among blacks and that we’ll all use this tragedy to further engage in the soul-searching President Obama urged us to do on Friday. Yes, we’ll move on from this, too. But we will be better people in a better place because of it.