When US gun culture meets segregation, Trayvon Martin seems to be the enemy within.
by Rowland Atkinson and Oliver Smith
George Zimmerman, who shot Trayvon Martin at a gated community in Sanford, Florida, in February, is to be charged with second-degree murder. The case, in which Martin, an unarmed black teenager, died, reminds us how young African-American males face prejudice and heightened risks of death or harm.
Zimmerman is Hispanic, making the case more than a simple reflection of racial hierarchies in US society, and he was the self-appointed neighbourhood-watch leader for The Retreat, a community of 264 homes. The incident was out of the ordinary but touched on concerns about US society's capacity to harm innocents.
We have investigated more than 50 documented cases of killings inside gated communities in the US in the past decade. These developments, protected by walls, gates, and sometimes guards and security technologies, are now home to more than one in 20 US households — middle-class black, white and Hispanic. They have a sense of embattled privilege and are selected for the safety, quality of homes and prestige they appear to offer: research shows how fearful many of their residents are.
Yet they are not immune to serious crime and violence: crime in gated communities is around the same level as in non-gated ones of a similar social profile, and residents are no safer than in ordinary high-income neighbourhoods. Criminologists often point out that the social composition of neighbourhoods is a better indicator of risk: in societies where social and material inequality is high, we see far higher levels of ghettoised distress and of violence and harm…
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About Gwynne Dyer
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
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