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Zimmerman, Dunn and what went horribly wrong: Author Lisa Bloom talks to Salon
From implicit racial bias to "stand your ground," Lisa Bloom says dangerous forces are distorting criminal justicePAUL ROSENBERG
With the recent second anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s death, legal analyst Lisa Bloom released a new book on the rash of shootings of black teens, “Suspicion Nation: The Inside Story of the Trayvon Martin Injustice and Why We Continue to Repeat It.” In addition to thoroughly re-analyzing the case and the trial in Part 1 of the book, answering questions about the case you didn’t even know you had, she devotes three chapters in Part 2 to underlying factors responsible for the repetition: implicit racial bias, America’s armed-to-the-teeth gun culture, and “stand your ground” laws.
“Implicit racial bias” refers to biases we aren’t even aware of having, but which researchers since the 1990s have become increasingly skilled at detecting and analyzing. Bloom’s analysis, however, focuses particularly on how these invisible forces — often directly at odds with our conscious intentions — interact with all-too-solid, virtually immovable institutional structures, such as education and the law. In hindsight, Bloom’s book helps us recognize how the effects of these interactions profoundly shaped, and ultimately deeply distorted, the course of events, from those leading up to Trayvon’s murder, to those that transpired in the trial and its aftermath.
Salon recently spoke with Bloom; a condensed version of our interview follows.
Let’s begin with why you wrote “Suspicion Nation.” Books about major crime trials are a major sub-genre unto themselves, but this didn’t strike me as your typical example of that sub-genre, so, what was your motivation for writing it?
I’ll take that as a compliment, thank you. I’m not really a crime genre writer/person either. I’m a legal analyst and I’ve covered every major crime story and legal story in America about the last 18 years. And it’s typically gone that I’ve covered the story — oftentimes it’s a very emotionally compelling case — and then it’s over and I move on to the next one, moved though I was by the case. In this one, I was not able to move on, and a few months after the trial was over I just was very disturbed by what I saw. But I wasn’t completely sure that the case was such an injustice. I had the sense that it was, but I couldn’t be sure.
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http://www.salon.com/2014/03/06/zimmerman_dunn_and_what_went_horribly_wrong_legal_analyst_lisa_bloom_talks_to_salon/
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