{"id":32491,"date":"2013-07-21T20:44:27","date_gmt":"2013-07-21T20:44:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=32491"},"modified":"2017-04-11T01:13:01","modified_gmt":"2017-04-11T01:13:01","slug":"trayvon-martin-and-making-whiteness-visible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=32491","title":{"rendered":"Trayvon Martin and Making Whiteness Visible"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trayvon Martin and Making Whiteness Visible<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

TIME Magazine<\/a>
\n2013-07-17<\/p>\n

Eric Liu<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

If there’s one good thing to come out of the George Zimmerman verdict, it’s the acknowledgement of white privilege<\/em><\/p>\n

If there is one hopeful note amid all the anguish and recrimination from the acquittal of George Zimmerman<\/a>, it\u2019s that growing numbers of white people have come to appreciate whiteness for what it is: an unearned set of privileges. And as a result of that dawning awareness, it\u2019s become possible to imagine a day when that structure of privilege is dismantled \u2014 by white people.<\/p>\n

Recall that immediately after the killing of Trayvon Martin<\/a>, people of every race took to the Internet to declare \u201cI am Trayvon Martin.\u201d They wore hoodies. They proclaimed solidarity. That was a well-meaning and earnest attempt to express empathy, but it also obscured the core issue, which is that Martin died not because he was wearing a hoodie but because he was wearing a hoodie while black. Blackness was the fatal variable.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And so now, post verdict, a more realistic meme has taken root. On Tumblr<\/a> and Facebook<\/a> and elsewhere there is a new viral phenomenon: \u201cWe are not Trayvon Martin\u201d (emphasis mine). Huge numbers of white Americans are posting testimonials and images to declare that it is precisely because they are not black that they have never had to confront the awful choices Martin faced when Zimmerman began to pursue him…<\/p>\n

…Much has been made about the fact that Zimmerman is white and of Hispanic ethnicity, as if he therefore couldn\u2019t possibly embody white privilege. This is a deep misreading of the dynamics of race and the media in America. As an Asian American, I am endlessly frustrated by how binary and black-and-white \u2014 literally and figuratively \u2014 the portrayal of race is in our country. Much of the time Asian Americans are an afterthought, or simply presumed foreign. But I assume that had I been the neighborhood watchman that day in Florida, I would have been understood in the media as the nonblack actor. Which is to say, for the limited purposes of this trial, I would have been granted \u201chonorary white\u201d status \u2014 whether or not I wanted it<\/strong>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If there\u2019s one good thing to come out of the George Zimmerman verdict, it\u2019s the acknowledgement of white privilege<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,14646,1467,8,23674,394,20],"tags":[4260,10140,19784,3521,10143],"class_list":["post-32491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-latino","category-law","category-media-archive","category-social-justice","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-eric-liu","tag-george-zimmerman","tag-time","tag-time-magazine","tag-trayvon-martin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32491"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53406,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32491\/revisions\/53406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}