I just read a really insightful opinion piece by Rich Benjamin, author of Whitopia.
This opinion piece is drawn from insights Benjamin gained writing the book, the subject of which he explains on his website:
By 2042, whites will no longer be the American majority. A related, less reported trend is that as people of color, especially immigrant populations, increase in cities and suburbs, more and more whites are living in small towns and exurban areas that are predominately, even extremely, white.
Call these places White Meccas. Or White Wonderlands. Or Caucasian Arcadias. Or Blanched Bunker Communities. Or White Archipelagos.
I call them Whitopia.
My journey to unlock the mysteries of Whitopia took me from a three-day white separatist retreat with links to Aryan Nations (North Idaho) to the inner sanctum of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — and many points in between. To learn what makes the Whitopias tick, and why and how they are growing, I lived in three of them for more than three months apiece — in Utah, Idaho, and Georgia.
I strongly urge you to read the book, which I did in researching my own book on American national identity. It gave me a number of helpful insights into the nature of white-black interactions and into the way both whites and blacks identify as Americans.
In the NYT piece, Benjamin emphasizes that the key to understanding why George Zimmerman killed Trayvon is what the author called "The Gated Community Mentality." Most of us on this site have focused on racism, and Benjamin places racism at the center of this mentality, but it is more than just racism, it also about class and a number of other factors, as he explained this mentality in detail:
The perverse, pervasive real-estate speak I heard in these communities champions a bunker mentality. Residents often expressed a fear of crime that was exaggerated beyond the actual criminal threat, as documented by their police department’s statistics.
(snip)
Gated communities churn a vicious cycle by attracting like-minded residents who seek shelter from outsiders and whose physical seclusion then worsens paranoid groupthink against outsiders.
(snip)
Residents’ palpable satisfaction with their communities’ virtue and their evident readiness to trumpet alarm at any given “threat” create a peculiar atmosphere — an unholy alliance of smugness and insecurity. In this us-versus-them mental landscape, them refers to new immigrants, blacks, young people, renters, non-property-owners and people perceived to be poor.
Benjamin explains that Zimmerman identified Trayvon as a threat because he "profiled" him as an outsider. Zimmerman's profile was based on Trayvon being young and black, but also on the perception that he was "loitering, non-property owning and poor."
Benjamin also makes an excellent point by noting that the police made a similar assumption when they arrived on the crime scene, namely that Zimmerman "belonged" in the gated community, as a presumed property-owner, while Trayvon was "the dangerous interloper." This explains why the police tested Trayvon's body for drugs and alcohol, but not Zimmerman's.
This piece contains a number of other important insights as well, including Benjamin's criticisms of what he described as our increasingly "privatized" system of law enforcement and criminal justice, and of the "Stand Your Ground" law. He argues that these laws, combined with the Gated Community Mentality, have cultivated a particular breed of vigilantism that instinctively and reflexively profiles people like Trayvon as people who, by definition, are only up to no good if they are seen in one of these communities.
Benjamin is right that it is not racism alone, but this bunker mentality fused with racist and class-based bigotry, that killed Trayvon. Please do read the entire piece.