Trayvon Martin and racism in America

Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot to death while walking to a convenience store in his Florida neighborhood to buy candy. /Family photo

Speaking out about race in America is dangerous: perilous for political careers, fracturing for friendships, inviting violence from extremists.

I have felt barely safe writing about racism in America. While being a white man married to an African-American comes with its own dangers, it's safe for people to assume I am not racist. While raised in a predominantly white, middle class town, I've experienced racism against African-Americans through the eyes of my wife and daughters. I've seen it when my loved ones react to racist incidents with a toxic brew of anger, isolation, disgust and despair.

The Trayvon Martin killing in Florida is the latest national reminder that racism is an enduring legacy of the American experience. Sadly, the widespread collective distress over George Zimmerman's acquittal in Trayvon's killing shows more time will have to pass before Americans reach the Promised Land that Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned 45 years ago.

Eliciting howls of protest from his political adversaries, President Obama recently said African-Americans look at Trayvon's killing and the Zimmerman verdict "through a set of experiences and history that doesn't go away." That's polite.

In my unique position as a journalist and spouse of an African-American, I can afford to be less polite.

• Trayvon Martin was racially profiled and his killing was a crime. If the roles were reversed, if Trayvon was a black adult who was stalking a Hispanic teenager while armed with a gun after the police had told him to stop, the vast majority of Americans know the Florida verdict would have been far different.
• Paula Dean is a racist. There's a reason why "nigger" is considered so vile that it gets "X-word" treatment in most public discourse, and its use can rarely be justified. Since the founding of the United States, this word has symbolized and reinforced the attempt to inflict subhuman status on African-Americans and to cast them as unworthy of equal citizenship. My wife has been called a nigger several times; in every instance, the speaker was attempting to dehumanize, denigrate, and strike the hideous historical chords of enslavement and discrimination. Imagine your race of Americans enduring 400 years of injustice, racially motivated slaughter, and political and economic disenfranchisement. Now imagine if there was one word that could make those centuries of torment pass before your eyes in an instant.
• Slavery and the ethnic animosity that sustains it have enduring influences on any society. The United States is one of the great beauties in the history of human civilization, but Americans are finding out how long it takes for a nation to heal the ugly wounds created when an entire race of people are enslaved.