Conclusion: Racial Justice Today

Abstract

On February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida, on the sixtieth anniver-sary of the publication of Invisible Man, a seventeen-year-old unarmed African American teenager, Trayvon Martin, was shot by a self- identified “Hispanic” neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman. Zimmerman claimed it was a matter of self-defense. Two years later, on July 14, 2014—in what was an eerie parallel to one of Invisible Man’s characters, Tod Clifton, an unarmed black man, former Brotherhood member, shot dead by white New York City police offi-cers for peddling black dolls—another unarmed black man, forty-three-year-old Eric Garner, was strangled to death by a white New York City police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, who believed Garner was resisting arrest for selling loose, untaxed cigarettes on a street in Staten Island. The incident was video-recorded. Less than a month later, on August 9, 2014, still another unarmed eighteen-year-old African American man, Michael Brown, was shot twelve times by another white police officer, Darren Wilson, who claimed to have feared for his life. The event occurred in broad daylight in Ferguson, Missouri.