"It Could Have Been Me" Really? Early Morning Meditations on Trayvon Martin's Death

Abstract

"It Could Have Been Me" Really? Early Morning Meditations on Tray vonMartin's Death Michelle V. Rowley "It Could Have Been Me" was the headline that marked the com ments offered by Dwayne Nash in The Chronicle ofHigherEducation.1 Nash, identified by interviewer Stacey Patton as a "35-year-old black grad uate student who is in his fourth year at Northwestern University's black-studies program," was interviewed in a cafe near the Schom burg Center for Research in Black Culture, one of the leading repos itories for scholarship and materials on and by peoples of African descent. Nash's graduate work, we are told, focuses on issues of racial profiling in New York City's local courts. Nash's dress—as described by Patton—in every way codes within a continuum that is decidedly Manhattan chic: "pinstriped suit, a Burberry tie, a powder-blue shirt, and wing-tipped shoes." In the interview, Patton conveys Nash's range of concerns about the vulnerabilities of contemporary black masculinity. Nash legiti mately points to the disproportionate number of black and Hispanic men who are stopped by the NYPD, asserting that eighty-five percent of police stops in New York target blacks or Hispanics, and he points to the racialization of threat—"We [black men] are being automati cally read as a threat, criminal, or suspicious at the very least." Nash then goes on to say: Instead of Tray von Martin, it could have been me that was killed. I know my time is coming when I'm going to be surrounded by an Feminist Studies38, no. 2 (Summer 2012). © 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 519 520 Michelle V. Rowley unbelievable abyss of fear. I pray that a gun barrel is not pointed to my face and that I am not shot and killed for making an innocent gesture or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time because of my skin color. And the wrong place could be in my own home. There is no right place for me.2 Trayvon Martin has rapidly become an "every(black)man": from the constant repetition by young black men across the country that "it could have been me" to the President's enunciation that if he had a son, "he would look like Trayvon," and more recently, Martin's mother's soulful declaration: "Travyon was our son, but Trayvon is your son."3 These rhetorical gestures are strategically and politi cally important in that they keep the cause for justice for Trayvon Martin alive. Ms. Martin's shift in tense from "was" to "is" certainly alerts us to this. Her words also rally the collective to the cause; they provoke fear and worry that moves us into action, and they produce empathy The danger, however, as Saidiya Hartman reminds us in her text Scenes of Subjection,is that empathy is a precarious business.4 Empathy can prompt us to lose sight of what is substantively on the table. What matters is not that it was Trayvon, but rather, Trayvon matters because it could have been me. Without intending or even thinking it necessary to dismiss this conflation (since I will return very briefly to why imagining oneself as Trayvon Martin remains politically significant), I think that there are some crucial points that we miss when we move too quickly to identify with, rather than to interrogate, this tragedy—for example, the slippery scale between the good and bad victim, the increasing militarization of our public space, and the insidious (and ongoing) racialization and classing of this militarization. Arguments asserting Martin's culpability in his own death have been shocking for many. The facts of this case are not yet clear (and, ultimately, one might say buried). But it is not my intent to argue for or against these culpability arguments because they are to all intents and purposes a red herring. I am fascinated, however, with how the idea of dress has been bandied around to argue for such culpabil ity, and even more germane to my purposes here, I am interested in how, despite—and maybe because of—the ubiquitous presence of the hoodie, this item actually comes to mark...