I once heard Maya Angelou say that we are all capable of each and every act, no matter how grand or horrid, that any other human being commits. Profound. It stuck like velcro, and emerged the other day as I discovered the thin line of difference between me and George Zimmerman, the man who has been charged with murdering Trayvon Martin.
It happened in the most simple way. I saw something on the news about George Zimmerman’s wife. His WIFE? The words took me by surprise. Why? The fact that a man is married is not typically shocking.
But I had unconsciously made George Zimmerman into something other than what most humans would be or what they would do. My lack of awareness of what I had done, was dangerous. Why? How could I ever challenge beliefs I don’t know I have? Zimmerman was, unknowingly in my mind, a man no one would marry, or perhaps a man who would not want to marry. Maybe he wasn’t interested in love at all. He was a loner, less human and clearly different from me.
But then suddenly he wasn’t. He had a wife. He is a man who loves someone, and that someone loves him back.
So there I was looking into the mirror of my own unconscious. While examining the image, I saw the very thing that allowed George Zimmerman to go after Trayvor Martin. The making of another into something not quite as human as I am. BINGO! UGLY, but nevertheless there, real, and staring back at me.
I don’t own a gun. I am not violent, although I have no doubt I could be, and I don’t live in state that has a Stand Your Ground law, but I am in other ways not so different from George Zimmerman.
Why is this important?
If all we do as a social system is project our own disavowed stereotypes onto George Zimmerman, or any one else, we will have learned nothing. We will simply have created an object of our own unconscious, another victim of stereotyping in some ways. Justice should, and hopefully will, apply to George Zimmerman, but the rest of us have something more personal to learn, and if we don’t, if our own minds go unexamined, there will be yet another Trayvon Martin and another George Zimmerman.
We can do better than that, can’t we?