A Black Man with a Hood; a White Man with a Gun

Chester Himes used to say that if you were a young, black male in the United States, the best thing you could do when a white man directed words at you was to stay quieter than a lamppost and look at him as if you were a lamb. A mere flicker, he added, authorized the white man to shoot you.

He said it half a century ago, and from what we know of the Trayvon Martin case, this advice continues to be valid, despite the fact that a biracial man named Obama lives in the White House.

Himes, a classic, and Walter Mosley, a contemporary, are both African-American authors of internationally known police novels. The plot of the former’s work takes place in Harlem (New York), and that of the latter in Los Angeles.

The grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents of contemporary African-Americans lived in fear of being lynched. Today, black mothers live in fear that something tragic will happen to their sons, something like what happened with Trayvon Martin, as told by Avis Jones-DeWeewer in her blog in The Huffington Post – “The Black Mother’s Burden.”

In the early evening this past Feb. 26, Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old student, was walking down a street in Stanford, Fla. after buying tea and candy. It was raining and he had put on the hood of his sweatshirt. He was going to his girlfriend’s house.

George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old white man of Latin-American descent, fixed his gaze on him. As the local laws permit, he became a voluntary vigilante for his neighborhood. He patrolled aboard his vehicle and was armed with a 9 mm caliber pistol.

Zimmerman called 911 and informed the local police that he had detected a “suspicious person” that was covered in a hood and had something in his hand (it was a cell phone). The agent told him not to do anything and to await the arrival of a patrol car.

When that car arrived, the kid was dead. Zimmerman had shot him.

Trayvon Martin was unarmed. His girlfriend heard his last words. He was talking to her by cell phone when the vigilante began to follow him in his car. The kid told his girlfriend that there was a guy following him.

Zimmerman was not slow in being set free without any type of charges. The local police accepted that he had acted in “self defense.” He was applied to a law, proposed by Governor Bush, that has governed Florida since 2006. Called “Stand Your Ground” and promoted throughout the country by the National Rifle Association, this law concedes the benefit of the doubt to the person that employs self-defense to justify homicide.

Stand Your Ground, which rules in another dozen U.S states, is an expansion of the traditional “Castle Doctrine,” which grants people the right to defend their person, as well as their home, by any method within reach. Currently, application of this law is extended to the neighborhood where one lives. In other words, if someone has the impression that they are in danger, they have the right to take arms and take down the suspect.

The Trayvon Martin case caused great excitement in the Unites States. Obama has said: “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”

Last week, the Federal Justice Department decided to open its own investigation after half a million North Americans signed an online petition so that the homicide did not go unpunished. Zimmerman followed the kid even after 911 told him not to do anything, and shot him because he was a black male who was walking with a hood through a primarily white neighborhood.

“All unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol,” wrote Chester Himes in his preface to the novel, “Hot Day Hot Night” (translated in Spain as “A Blind Man with a Pistol”). Feverish, syncopated and violent, this work, as with the majority of Himes’, has African-American detectives, Harlem Sepulturero Jones and Ataúd Johnson, as protagonists. In his prologue to “Run Man Run,” another of Himes’ novels published by Bruguera at the end of the 1970s, Juan Carlos Martini wrote: “The will and whim of the white man are the law. … The black man does not seem to have any solution more than a sad integration and an indiscriminate acceptance of arbitrariness that exercise control against him. Any other, even if expressed in the most humble and fearful form imaginable, could mean immediate death.”