Friday, March 23, 2012
Florida shooter George Zimmerman not easily pigeonholed
By Manuel Roig-Franzia, Tom Jackman and Darryl Fears
The Washington Post
The shooter was once a Catholic altar boy, with a surname that could have been Jewish.
His father is white, neighbors say. His mother is Latina. And his family is eager to point out that some of his relatives are black.
There may be no box to check for George Zimmerman, 28, no tidy way to categorize, define and sort the man whose pull of a trigger on a Sanford, Fla., street is forcing America to once again confront its fraught relationship with race and identity. The slain victim, we know, was named Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager in a hoodie.
The images of Zimmerman — not just his face, but the words used to describe him — can confound and confuse.
Why are they calling him white, wondered Paul Ebert, the Prince William County commonwealth's attorney who knew Zimmerman's mother, Gladys, from her days as an interpreter at the county courthouse. Zimmerman's mother, Ebert knew, was Peruvian, and he thought of her as Hispanic.
Emphasizing diversity
Zimmerman's father has sought to emphasize his family's diversity in hopes of saving his son from condemnation as a racist.
While images of protests from across the country skitter past on television screens, the elder Zimmerman has tried to do what others have been doing, in various ways, for days: define his son. George is "a Spanish-speaking minority," the father wrote in a letter delivered to The Orlando Sentinel. "He would be the last to discriminate for any reason whatsoever." George, the father insisted, was more like the boy he killed than people thought. George was a minority — the other — too.
The argument the father is making feels hollow and self-serving to Michaela Angela Davis, an African-American writer and activist who lives in New York. In her eyes, George Zimmerman's Hispanic roots don't give him cover.
"You being a minority doesn't make you immune to racist beliefs," she said in an interview Thursday. Davis sees a pervasive cultural imprint, reinforced by media and entertainment imagery: the black man as a symbol of "violence, fear and deviant behavior." A young man could be susceptible to the influence of that image whether his "mother is from Peru or Norway."
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