Against the Stream

Processing the Trayvon Martin Verdict

Since the verdict in George Zimmerman's trial for the murder of Trayvon Martin, there has been a lot of traffic on the internet trying to parse what it all means about American politics, the state of race relations in the United States, and the nature of the criminal justice system. For my part, I only paid passing attention to the trial itself, though I followed the initial events quite closely. Needless to say, I was shocked and dismayed that Zimmerman was acquitted, even when the jury was given the option to convict him of the lesser (and probably more appropriate) charge of manslaughter.

On the one hand, I think there can be no question that Martin's murder and Zimmerman's acquittal are rooted in the lingering fact of racism in the United States. As many people have pointed out in the past few days, it is hard to imagine that if the roles were reversed in this case, and a black man had stalked and murdered an unarmed latino boy, that the results would have been the same. The fact that the jury was largely white may have played a role, though obviously these kinds of things are hard to determine definitively.

An editorial in the nation stated the underlying issue well from my perspective:

When Zimmerman was acquitted today, it wasn’t because he’s a so-called white Hispanic. He’s not. It’s because he abides by the logic of white supremacy, and was supported by a defense team—and a swath of society—that supports the lingering idea that some black men must occasionally be killed with impunity in order to keep society-at-large safe.

At the same time, it is worth noting, as Ta-Nehisi Coates notes in The Atlantic, that the prosecution was dealt a weak hand from the beginning:

I think the jury basically got it right. The only real eyewitness to the death of Trayvon Martin was the man who killed him. At no point did I think that the state proved second degree murder. I also never thought they proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he acted recklessly. They had no ability to counter his basic narrative, because there were no other eye-witnesses.

And this is of course in large measure the issue: The law in Florida as it now stands allows for a murderer to claim self-defense against an unarmed teenager. The law is written explictly to permit the kinds of acts that George Zimmerman engaged in, which, even if one believed the defense's version of events (which I don't), and grant the idea that Martin attacked Zimmerman, simply should not be permitted.

It is now the case that any physical alteraction in the state of Florida can culminate in someone's death, and as long as the killer can credibly claim that they are "standing their ground" they can get away with it. And in the absence of another witness, such claims are frighteningly easy to make.

But more disturbing to me has been the degree to which Zimmerman has been held up as some kind of hero by figures on the American political right. This seems to be an example of what Matt Yglesias often refers to as the right wing's obssions with being "anti-anti-racist." In other words, the argument goes, "racism, either personal or structural is no longer a problem in the United States; rather, the problem now is those who seek to make racism a problem by continuing to bring it up." Thus, as Ed Kilgore noted in the Washington Monthly, blacks are admonished to "get over" Jim Crow, even as the Supreme Court cuts the heart out of the voting rights act and state after state passes laws explicitly and self-consciously designed to reduce the black vote.

And of course, this provides ongoing cover for those who are willing to traffic in explicitly racist rhetoric, making insinuations about the propensity of blacks to riot in the wake of unpopular court verdicts (without of course, either a) considering whether that's actually true or b) contemplating why a riot might seem to be a reasonable response in a community for which the courts have often not historically been a vehicle for justice). Fox news, as usual, straddles this divide quite neatly, seldom explicitly crossing over into overtly racist tropes, while at the same time feeding the racial animus of its core audience.

I am optimistic and forward-looking by nature, and tend to believe that, in the end, justice tends to prevail over injustice. As Martin Luther King once said, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Yet, on days like today, in the wake of verdicts like Saturday's, that arc seems very long indeed, and it is for this reason that I cannot allow myself to be sustained by the mere facts of the moral world in which we live, but to be sustained by the possibility that that arc does in fact, far off in the distance, beyond my line of sight, ultimately bend toward justice.

In Your American Skin

I was about to go to bed last night when I got the news that George Zimmerman had been acquitted of the murder of Treyvon. I'm not sure I have a lot to add to the ongoing conversation. I'm still processing. But I couldn't help but be reminded:

 

Is it a gun, is it a knife
Is it a wallet, this is your life
It ain't no secret (It ain't no secret)
It ain't no secret (It ain't no secret)
No secret my friend
You can get killed just for living in Your American skin

On the Possibility of Hell

 

Via Slacktivist, I have become acquainted with a new blog, called "Camels With Hammers." I'll have more to say about some of the posts there later on, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about one post in particular that jumped out at me, and which apparently originally drew Fred's attention at Slacktivist.

The blog addresses issues of philosophy, ethics, and atheism, and the author is a former evangelical Christian who was, as he puts it, de-converted from Christianity by reading Nietzsche (and indeed, as a Nietzsche lover myself, I can think of no better way to be de-converted!).

The post that I'm interested in discussing here has to do with the question of why atheists would be offended at being told (by certain believers) they're going to hell. Daniel, the author, eloquently presents what I think is the major problem with the way that hell is understood most of the time by most Christians, vis:

Wanting anyone else to be eternally tortured is pretty creepy. Sometimes in anger, any of us may have thoughts that we’d like someone to die flash through our minds. If you’re like me, you’re horrified and repulsed in those moments. If you’re a violent and hateful person you may start making scary death threats. If you’re a Christian you may just baptize your hateful thought as “concern” for your irritant’s soul before it even becomes fully conscious. You call your resentful defensiveness “love” and by telling the atheist they’re going to hell you do several satisfying things at once. You signal to the outsider that not being a member of your tribe has penalties. You reaffirm your own good standing in your tribe and with your God as someone who isan obedient and appreciative recipient of your God’s gracious offer of salvation. You get to both tell someone off and call it love. You get to count yourself one of the special insiders while feeling yourself a properly humble worshipper.

I think this is, of course, absolutely true. For many Christians hell is indeed a way of threatening a non-believer to conform with your own belief system, and, as Daniel notes, a way of differentiating insiders and outsiders. One of the more distasteful aspects of many believers insistence on the belief in hell is the apparent relish with which they imagine enjoying the eternal torture of unbelievers as they watch from the balconies of heaven.

It's for this reason that I think the whole idea of hell as it's most commonly understood is both obsolete and damaging to Christianity, as well as being unhelpful as a means of articulating Christian faith. Indeed, I think many a non-Christian, when faced with the alternative of hell, might opt, as Daniel suggests, for a respectable damnation rather than submit to a humiliating and self-destroying salvation. (And, parenthetically, of course much of the Christian rhetoric of salvation tends to support this, with its own understanding of what it means to "die to self"). If I lean rather strongly toward a brand of universalism, it's for these very reasons. I can't escape the remark made at one point by Jürgen Moltmann, that a God who would condemn a person to an eternal fire is infinitely worse than Hitler, who was at least only able to torment his victims for a limited time.

However, the qualifier to all of this has to do with the question of what it means to talk about damnation from a Christian perspective. Can one have damnation without a "hell" in any traditional form? I think that damnation is indeed a possibility, and a real threat, though not, as Daniel would have it, a threat made by believers as a bludgeon against unbelievers. Rather it is the threat that stands over all existence by the possibility of non-being. Insofar as God is understood to be the Ground and Source of Being, alienation from God, which is what we're talking about when we use the word "damnation" is ultimately the threat in which we all perpetually stand of being permenantly and irrevocably alienated from Being itself. Damnation in that sense is the refusal of ultimacy, the embrace of nothingness, and the rejection of the possibility of a transcendent source of meaning.

Damnation in that sense, I think, is not only possible, but as I note, a threat that stands over all of existence. If there is no Ground of Being, or ultimate unconditioned reality that sustains us all and provides a source of meaning and value to all things (however that source of meaning and value is named), then all of creation is condemned to that same kind of damnation. Life is truly, then, a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound an fury, yet signifying nothing."

And indeed, I cannot prove that this is not the case. Those atheists who embrace that possibility and seek to make meaning and value out of existence nevertheless in that sense represent a kind of courage that ought to be admired rather than condemned. But at the same time, acknowledging the reality of that threat is not the same thing as "threatening," particularly when I perceive myself as being under threat no less than anyone else.

But, at the same time, if there is a Ground and Source of Being, to whom we are accountable and who provides a foundation of meaning and value within existence, however that soure of meaning and value is named, then my contention is that all of existence is ultimately suffused with Grace, and final damnation in any kind of eternal sense, is impossible, since we are all ultimately welcomed into the great feast of Being itself, and the door to that feast is eternally open.