"A Moving Bubble of Wilderness"

A young man in a hoodie strolls through a quiet, gated community. He is returning to a friend’s house after purchasing a drink and some candy at a nearby convenience store.

Such ordinary, unremarkable moments in a life. How, then, did this young man end up shot to death on those meticulously manicured HOA lawns?

Crime scene photo courtesy CBS News

Others have told, and continue to tell, this story from every imaginable perspective. Trouble is, not one of these represents What Really Happened, an impossibility of fact and yet the one thing we desire above all else. Denied this, what remains, what seems clear, regardless of guilt or innocence, regardless of the questionable and violent choices made by any one man, is that Trayvon Martin was perceived as an outsider, a stranger, and a threat to the idealized inhabitants of George Zimmerman’s community. Seems obvious, right? Such perception has been used to justify the killing of another human being.

Yet what also seems clear is that if the brief and mundane scene I sketched in the first sentence of this post had happened in any number of other neighborhoods, it could have passed unremarked, extraordinarily ordinary. In still other settings, perhaps this scene could have played out as “routine” gang violence, the violent death of yet another young man stamped and filed by local authorities without investigation or a second thought. It is the combination, the volatile mixture of this individual, in that specific place, that facilitated (and, per the court’s decision, vindicated) violence and death, the indelible remnants of which will forever mark the shooter and his target, their families and communities, with injury, with tragedy.

Horrified, today I have watched my academic musings over the potency of what I call white space (see below) spill off the pages of abstract theorizing and take form on a national stage, a morbid verification of what I have suspected all along: despite all our protests, despite our veneer of “civilization,” all our empty talk of colorblindness, tolerance, freedom and peace and whatever else you’d like to throw in there, we, as a people, as collectives and communities, are not so very far removed from our slaveholding, Native-slaughtering, indigenous-eradicating past—and we all know it. Deep down, we know, and we work so hard to build illusions of cohabitation that, in the end, simply do not cohabit with the lived realities of our others. 

Yet our investment in deluding ourselves is so extensive that, at this point, we are incapable of abandoning it.

What, then, is to be done? Could the tragic death of Trayvon Miller, or any of our multitudes of unnamed, un-mourned men, have been prevented? In light of our current, obsessive focus on denial, I say, regrettably, no. Not in this place, at this moment in time. But that doesn’t preclude the possibility for future shifts, in which we get honest with ourselves and, ideally, shift our energy away from supporting poisonous fantasies of colorblind justice and toward working on the insidious source of our problems—selfishness, greed, prejudice, and a deep-seated belief in our God-given right to contribute to the oppression of others.

From “’Bubbles of Wilderness’: The Rhetorics of Non-white Bodies in White Space” by Shersta Chabot, 2 May 2013:

 “In the United States, some bodies are more susceptible to “becoming” strange than others. This is due in part to the national structures of power that frame a white dominant culture rooted directly in the oppressive ideologies of white supremacism. The resulting cultural environment generates, and manifests through, what film critic Audrey Foster labels white space: locations and/or moments that are constructed and governed by heteronormative, white supremacist ideology. Recognizing the way that this white space constitutes nonwhite, and thus in this context non-normative, bodies, Charles Mills asserts that “[t]he nonwhite body is a moving bubble of wilderness in white political space, a node of discontinuity which is necessarily in permanent tension with it” (53). Following Mills’ conceptualization, this essay focuses primarily on the tension between the nonwhite body and white space, which includes the communal white space of the white cultural imaginary.”