The Haunting of Evidence

Items taken from Trayvon Martin’s cell phone—including a text-message discussion of drug use and pictures of a gun and marijuana plants—are among new details released Thursday by attorneys for the neighborhood watch volunteer accused of killing him without provocation 14 months ago. The evidence, George Zimmerman’s attorneys say, paints a different picture of the 17-year-old than the one portrayed by his family and supporters.

Given the amount of incriminating evidence against George Zimmerman, the 28-year-old man who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin as the teenager walked home with Skittles and iced tea, it was clear that Zimmerman’s defense planned to try Martin’s personhood. In the case of Martin and so many others—Renisha McBride, Oscar Grant, Jordan Davis—the dead are on trial, even as the pleas of so many dead never enter the courtroom or are unthinkable under normative epistemologies. As Ta-Nehisi Coates (2013) writes, “The advantage goes to the living.” By connecting Martin to drug use and guns, the defense attempted to devalue Martin’s life by arguing that he was always already a threat; like all criminalized populations, Martin was “ineligible for personhood” (Cacho, 2012, p. 6). In short, the defense argued that Martin was killable regardless of any other evidence. Indeed, much of the popular discourse around the investigation and subsequent trial centered on Martin: from questions about who Martin really was to surveillance footage of Martin in the 7-Eleven prior to his murder where he did not demonstrate any “aggressive behavior” (Gray, 2012). Doctored photos became racist memes about supposed media bias favoring Martin over Zimmerman (Capehart, 2013). The response of many outraged by Martin’s killing was to insist that he was innocent, that he was a child who only wanted iced tea and Skittles, and that he did not deserve to be killed. Yet, the logic of both sides upholds a methodology of social value where the law-abiding, good, normative citizen is recognized, protected, and incorporated against a disavowed, devalued, deviant non-normativity that is deserving of (social) death. As Lisa Cacho (2012) writes, value “always implies devaluing a not-valued ‘other’” (p. 17). In this way, violence and terror are legitimate and necessary if the proper populations are targeted.

In this essay, we situate the murder of Martin within the history of the relationship between evidence and anti-blackness, suggesting that evidence and facts are rendered irrelevant when it comes to racialized violence and terror. Through an examination of the circulated “media narrative” images of Martin and Zimmerman, we argue that the failure of evidence is bound up with a racialized optics rooted in U.S. chattel slavery that overdetermines blackness as a political ontology of criminality. One cannot prove blackness innocent because guilt is a foregone conclusion. We thus position the murder of Martin within Saidiya Hartman’s (2007) notion of the “afterlife of slavery.” This concept names the fact that

[B]lack lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. (p. 6)

This analytic describes the ways that the political, social, and economic logics central to chattel slavery structure and possess our current moment. It also makes visible the centuries-long devaluation of black life that manifests itself in the biopolitics of everyday life. We can witness this relationship in national debates in media and popular culture about the meaning behind photos of Zimmerman and Martin taken before the killing.

Although predictable, the virulence of the racialized attacks on Martin was profound as an onslaught of racist imagery began to circulate digitally soon after the case garnered national attention. ¹ One of the most circulated images featured a photo of Zimmerman frowning in what appears to be a mug shot (see Figure 1). This image was compared with a photo of Martin smiling as a young child. Below, the images are putatively reversed, with a shot of Zimmerman smiling in a suit and tie. In this photo, Zimmerman embodies the happy upstanding citizen he claimed to be—the presumption is that smiling men in suits do not murder children. The “reverse” photo of Martin features him shirtless, pants sagging, underwear hanging out, and flipping off the camera. The accompanying text reads as follows: “Don’t believe in the ‘Media Narrative’? Then why are you being shown this . . . (5-7 years old) instead of this (current).” The argument implied (and the imagined evidence offered) by the circulation of these photos was that Martin was not an innocent child, but rather, a proto-thug who threatened the safety and security of the normative citizen. It is also worth noting the gender and sexual politics central to the racialized devaluation of Martin. As scholars like Beth Richie (2012), Angela Davis (1981), Cathy Cohen (1997), and Regina Kunzel (2008) have demonstrated, the racialization of the criminal occurs through discourses of immorality, deviancy, pathology, and abnormality that expunge the figure of the criminal from the realm of gender and sexual normativity. The racialized criminal (for the criminal is always racialized) is also already sexually deviant and perverse. In the representations of Martin and Zimmerman, we see decades of racialized and gendered “law and order” policies and an even longer legacy of blackness constructed as criminal at work. By combining the photos this way, the “media narrative” image draws on long-standing popular assumptions about what killers and criminals look like: Well-dressed men do not murder children, and shirtless young black men are deserving of death. The image understands the iconography of anti-blackness, wherein “thug,” “gang member,” and “hoodlum” are yoked to Martin’s style, thereby signifying his guilt. Although the photos were imagined to be evidence of something for which the trial could not account, the trial itself similarly could not make the evidence speak in favor of the dead. The law and the larger media narratives about the case were looking for truth in a place that it could not be.

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Figure 1.

A popular meme concerning guilt and innocence.

For example, the 911 recordings of the murder of Martin contained a scream, and in the courtroom and the media, there was a debate about what truth resided there. The scream was imagined to be evidence of something that was otherwise unknowable. Tracy Martin, the father of Trayvon Martin, told the jury, “I was listening to my son’s last cry for help . . . I was listening to his life being taken.” Friends and coworkers of George Zimmerman testified that the scream was his and that it meant he was defending his life. The Martin family issued a statement that Zimmerman told police a few days after murdering Martin that the scream was not his. Zimmerman’s uncle testified that “[i]t was George Zimmerman screaming for his life. . . . I felt it inside of my heart that it is George.” The rest of the Martin family testified that it was the voice of Trayvon (Bogado, 2013). What unimaginable and unknowable truths reside within a scream? How do we know what happened, even when we don’t know what happened? What truths escape the state’s determination of what is real and factual? How does the possessive history of anti-blackness demand a different accounting of the real? Following the state’s logic of evidence and proof, the evidence against George Zimmerman was not sufficient for the jury. But what if we were to consider subjugated forms of knowledge beyond the state’s determination of what is true? What if we accounted for the foundational anti-blackness that shapes the legal system, or the legacy of a racialized media system so steeped in anti-blackness that it sees blackness as criminality, deviance, and death? ²

In his book by the same name, James Baldwin (1985) demands an accounting of The Evidence of Things Not Seen. For Baldwin, to find a truth in what cannot be seen is to remember the racialized and gendered deaths that must be forgotten for equality and freedom to be named as such. Baldwin uses fiction, memory, and imagination to connect the forgotten, the lost, and the dead to the now. His text insists that the absence of memory shapes the contours of the present, and that something with a world-shattering force lies in what is erased, forgotten, and disappeared. We are haunted, he argues, and to hear the demands of the dead, we must undo the epistemologies that lead us toward what we know and think we know. This means engaging histories we cannot fully know and evidence whose proof lies in what cannot be seen.

As a means to navigate this process and what she calls the “fictions of the real,” Avery Gordon (1997) calls for a “method attentive to what is elusive, fantastic, contingent, and often barely there” (pp. 11, 26). Gordon attempts to reckon with what modern history has rendered ghostly, “to engage the shadows and what is living there” or in the words of Toni Morrison, make the invisible visible because “invisible things are not necessarily not-there” (Gordon, 1997, p. 17). For Gordon and Morrison, the “not there,” the fictive, and the unknown act as a “seething presence,” altering space, memory, identity, and bodies, charging the present with an occluded and forgotten past (Gordon, 1997, p. 195). Gordon’s concept of haunting—a way of theorizing and understanding the “not there”—“occurs on the terrain situated between our ability to conclusively describe the logic of Capitalism or State Terror” (Gordon, 1997, p. 24). Haunting is a way to engage that for which evidence cannot account and describes a way of knowing that exceeds the state’s determination of what is real and true. Women of color feminists have practiced this politics for longer than we can know as they have recorded, theorized, and resisted forms of racialized and gendered violence and terror.

In attempting to grapple with the erasures inherent in dominant regimes of knowledge, Angela Davis (1981) and Grace Hong (2006) point to other ways of knowing that cannot be categorized as either “fact” or “fiction” (Hong, 2006, pp. xxx-xxxi). In her classic essay, “Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist,” Davis notes that most rapists remain anonymous and that this fact is often dismissed as a statistical detail of little significance, or as a mystery whose meaning is inaccessible (Hong, 2006). Davis writes, “although white men who are employers, executives, politicians, doctors, professors, etc., have been known to ‘take advantage’ [emphasis added] of women they consider their inferiors, their misdeeds seldom come to light in court” (Hong, 2006, p. xxx). Davis’s hypothesis cannot be “proven” because of the very structures of racist power that produce this epistemological erasure in the first place (Hong, 2006, p. xxx). Where no evidence exists to “prove” her argument, Davis, instead, relies on unwritten, colloquial knowledge that must exist without an author. The colloquialism “have been known to take advantage of” references an entire terrain of knowledge and vocabulary created by working class black women to record their experiences of white male predation, to catalogue and archive that which is often unspeakable and often unprovable (Hong, 2006, p. xxx). For Hong and Davis, statistical knowledge, court records, and historical archives fail to apprehend racially gendered and sexualized violence against women of color. This forgetting, or what Lisa Lowe (2006) calls “the politics of our lack of knowledge,” becomes the condition of possibility for notions of freedom and “the human” so that the apprehension and naming of this loss—of the violence and terror that is forgotten—comes to constitute “what remains” (pp. 206-207).

Women of color feminism thus offer a longer genealogy of how evidence fails in the face of deeply entrenched anti-blackness and a legal system rooted in epistemologies unable to account for racialized and gendered violence. In this way, anti-blackness makes possible a “racially saturated field of visibility” so that even video evidence, seemingly incontrovertible, renders a “not guilty” verdict in the case of Rodney King (Butler, 1993, p. 15). In that instance, a white field of vision could stare at a black body being beaten and see the opposite. This is the afterlife of slavery, and it demands a new notion of the truth, a new measure of value, and a new politics of justice that is currently unthinkable. As we imagine justice for those who have been lost, expelled, and killed, we must think beyond the limits of the law, the death of the prison, and the state’s determination of what is true. We must also follow the lead of Davis and so many others who have tried to make a claim to the value of black life without degrading or devaluing other lives and deaths in the process.