By Jaysen Bazile and Thais Marquez
We are Trayvon Martin. We are young. We are black and we are Latino. And if one of us had been walking through George Zimmerman’s neighborhood that evening wearing a hoodie, we would also be dead. This is a reality that is not lost on us or on the thousands of other youth of color in Newark.
As students in the Newark Public School system, most of us come from the same social location as Trayvon Martin. We are frequently targeted in exactly the same way he was. We are profiled because we are black or Latino or mixed-race. The Florida jury’s ruling in the Zimmerman trial proved that this type of profiling won’t be ending any time soon — and sadly, that a postracial America hasn’t yet seen the light of day.
The ruling sends a message that is bigger than the fact that justice was denied Trayvon and his family. It’s yet another precedent reinforcing what we’ve already learned: that kids like us don’t fit into the calculus of the criminal justice system and that we can expect to be profiled in exactly the same way as Trayvon. We live in the fear that our lives will end as tragically and unnecessarily as Trayvon’s — and without consequence.
Racism and racial profiling are not abstract concepts to us. In fact, they never were because we experience it every day. Racial profiling will follow us even as we grow older. We will be more likely to be victimized by other powerful institutions seeking to deny us our humanity and steal our lives and livelihoods.
Our public schools are robbed of the funds we need to properly educate our young people, and do so in buildings that are falling apart. Our homes will be targeted by predatory lending practices and illegal foreclosures by banks. We will be pushed into jobs and professions where we are denied a living wage, health care and the right to organize a union. We will be subjected to the whims of biased institutions who would like nothing more than to deny us the right to vote. These are the messages we hear.
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