“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”: Troubling the Visual Optics of RacePosted in Arts, Communications/Media Studies, Media Archive, Social Work, United States on 2014-06-08 22:01Z by Steven |
“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”: Troubling the Visual Optics of Race
Flow
Volume 17, Issue 9 (2013-03-28)
Isabel Molina-Guzmán, Associate Professor of Media and Cinema Studies; Associate Professor of Latina/o Studies; Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
On February 26, 2013, the one year anniversary of the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, FL by George Zimmerman, I stare at the beautiful face of Trayvon Martin on my television screen and online news feed. I study his cinnamon brown skin, big teddy bear brown eyes and long black lashes, trimmed tight curly black hair, well-sculpted nose and full lips. I hear the invisible and terrified cries for help, the shot, and the silence.
I am racially black and I am of Puerto Rican and Dominican ethnic descent. And I see my father, uncles, cousins. I silently remember President Barack Obama’s somber observation more than a year ago: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
The Problems with the Visual Optics of “Race”
I remember being frustrated by the news narratives that categorize Martin as black and George Zimmerman as white simply because of the color of their skin. After all, if Martin could be the son of our first mixed race president or be my son, his identity should be more complicated than the color of his skin. Martin’s gender, class, and ethnoracial complexities remain irrelevant – he was essentially, biologically, and categorically a black man. As a racial or ethnic identity, blackness remains static despite US Census reports that the black population is more racially and ethnically diverse that ever before with more than 25% of the growth among black Americans driven by immigration. Indeed Haitians are among Florida’s largest immigrant population.
Nevertheless, who is defined as black in the United States continues to be defined by the problematic rules of biological hypodescent – the one drop rule that defines anyone with one drop of “black blood” as black. How that “one drop” is often determined is by the visual resonances of blackness; and, Martin “looks” black.
Amidst civil rights protest calling for Martin’s murder to be classified as racial profiling and a hate crime, the story becomes more complicated and more troubling…
Read the entire article here.