Trayvon Martin: An All (African) American Experience

In the age of  “Trending Topics” on Twitter and the infinite “shared items” on Facebook, it’s easy for a potentially big story to pass you by, especially if you’re one of those people who has the misfortune to be friends with or to follow someone who posts long streams of nonsense or celebrity gossip. I was among those ranks when I passed over the story of Trayvon Martin days ago. The fact that I hadn’t heard of him prior to then didn’t necessarily alert me to the possibility that maybe this story was something atypical and worthwhile. I instead erred on the side of assuming it was another rapper or rap group – do you know how long it took me to figure out Travis Porter was a group? – that I hadn’t heard of and didn’t want anything to do with this new movement. Unlike most other pop culture trends, Trayvon’s name didn’t go away. If anything, I began seeing it on CNN, Yahoo News, and the New York Times, and it made me pause, click, and read.

About 30-60 seconds into reading his story, I kinda laughed to myself and shook my head.

Back in the summer of 2005 while roaming the rugged streets of New Haven, Connecticut, I was struggling to come up with a topic or angle to take for my upcoming personal statement to medical school. I’d already written a typical, autobiographic piece that talked about who I was, where I was from, and why I wanted to pursue medicine, one that made the writing instructor who was helping me with this endeavor shake his head and tell me “Go deeper, more personal. Tell them something important about YOU.” After about two more weeks of thinking and throwing around ideas, I had an argument with a close friend that led my very tangential and circumspect mind to crank out the rough and final draft of my personal statement, which addressed who I was at the very core of ways to define me, both for myself and for others:  I wrote about how I was the “big Black man” to most people who saw me and the ramifications of that in my life.

Not surprisingly, when I let other people read it, it made them uncomfortable. They used words like “very strong” and “very personal” but many who edited it, all of whom were college professors, felt that it would leave people feeling bad or guilty for being able to relate to the stories I told in my statement. The writing instructor, a large, elderly Polish man, said himself, “I LOVE this piece and want to share it with my class, but you’ve really got to ask yourself if you want to send out something SO personal that it makes people uncomfortable.” I respected his honesty as well as the honesty of the others who gave me input prior to my uploading and submitting my piece, but I felt that this story told who I was best while also selling how dedicated I would be as a clinician.

I was a 21 year old biology student with a 3.87 GPA, >95th percentile MCAT score, wearing a Yale School of Medicine sweatshirt the first time I was deemed “suspicious looking.” The next time was at age 27 when I was looking for a doctor’s office and an office worker, who couldn’t see my Columbia University student badge, called security to ask me what I was doing and where I was going since I seemed to be looking around for something and looked “suspicious.” Imagine their shock when they realized I was a student. Chances are, if you talk to any Black man, be he highly educated at an Ivy League institution or a 17 year old boy simply walking from a convenience store with Skittles for a sibling, you’re likely to find that he has at least ONE story about being labeled “intimidating” or “suspicious” for no reason other than he is Black. If you spoke to a Black woman, she may tell you about being asked if she were a prostitute or described in a whorish fashion just because she is shapely and Black – it’s not always correlated to how she’s dressed either. My Hispanic, Asian, and Middle Eastern friends would all have similar stories about some stereotyped harassment that they’ve endured simply by being in a particular place at a particular time, which is to say a large part of the population in the US has experienced some type of racial discrimination in their lifetime. Having accepted this as fact, why is it that we STILL have not as of March 20, 2012 had an HONEST discourse about the role of race in American society? We’ve been ok with avoiding being “uncomfortable” for far too long. Trayvon is just one of numerous instances we all can name in the past 10 years alone where race was clearly (or at least likely) the sole motivating factor behind something heinous, be it a judgment, a charge, or an assault. We are burying people and imprisoning people for life, many times unjustly so, because of their race…but we’re too afraid to talk about it. This has to stop, people.

Next to the election of President Barack Obama, the most inspiring thing I’ve seen in my adult life was the movement that took place when banks wanted to start charging clients a fee for using their debit cards. The airwaves and Facebook and Twitter came to life with people outraged about this BS the banks were trying to pull on people, and people ACTED on it. They threatened to leave, to do something that would directly harm the cause of something ridiculous being forced upon them. They mobilized and took a stand and WON. Think about it:  How long after introducing the idea of charging for debit use did people effectively get it eradicated? But we won’t talk about and address race, something that’s affected many more for much longer with bigger ramifications than a monthly charge? This is ridiculous. We’ve gotta take action. We’ve gotta talk. We’ve got to protest. We’ve got to do more than put up a poignant Facebook status or support an ailing family with a hashtag. We’ve got to do more than sign a petition with no power or watch the news and voice our anger to those we know feel the same we do. We’ve gotta do MORE and SOON before this country erupts in a very violent way like it does in all other great civilizations, just before their downfall.