Trayvon Martin, Biopolitical Murder & Empire by A. Shahid Stover

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#9, SEPT-NOV/2013

The murder of Trayvon Martin reveals the extent of George Zimmerman’s complete interiorization of the normative gaze of modernity. A normative gaze that intimately gestates as alienation from human ‘being’ within imperialist formations of identity, thus demeaning potentialities of intersubjective resonance towards a permanence of racist alterity between an anthropologically sanctioned ‘being-in-the-world’ constituted as the imperial mainstream, and a ‘problematic’ and biopolitically dangerous ‘being-in-the-world’ constituted as the socio-ontological underground of modernity. Zimmerman, not exactly one to ever be mistaken for belonging to the ruling power elite, is a working class collaborationist with Empire. As such, his racism vacillates between stages of objective and affective polarity, culminating in attempts at securing official sanction from Empire for his claim to mainstream identity through the biopolitical murder of Trayvon Martin.

Zimmerman patrols the imperially coherent topographical margins between mainstream and underground of modernity as an unpaid volunteer seeking socio-ontological security as an unofficial lackey of established power, without even the structural-inert legitimacy of neo-colonial police force to constitute the hegemonic sovereignty of Empire through objective violence. Indeed, his actions reveal a spiritual evasion of freedom and responsibility, in the hopes of assuming a ‘fixed’ identity of ‘empirical self-as-rational animality’ within the imperial mainstream in exchange for embracing his own overdetermination-from-without.

From the safe confines of his vehicle, Zimmerman, former captain of the ‘neighborhood watch’, adopts the normative gaze of established power and is initially able to see Martin as “a real suspicious guy” without being seen. Thus sealing off the human trajectory of lived Black experience within ‘objecthood’, through the discursive zoological indictment of a “black male” nonchalantly walking around wearing a hooded sweatshirt. However, the racist dehumanizing privilege enjoyed by Zimmerman of seeing without being seen, [1] is soon fundamentally called into question by the recognition of Martin that he is being followed. Even this slight intersubjective resonance between Martin and Zimmerman is enough to temporarily disrupt the normative gaze that is predicated upon the socio-ontological imposition of an imperial coherent topography remaining imperceptible by the Other-as-subhuman ‘objecthood’.

Zimmerman’s racism is voluntaristic, freeing itself from the safe confines of the structural-inert, and as such he experiences the loss of his anonymity as a menacing turn requiring self-justification before the intersubjective resonance generated by Martin’s gaze of recognition that decisively intervenes against Zimmerman’s reliance on the privilege of seeing without being seen. Therefore, being seen by Martin confers upon Zimmerman a socio-ontological insecurity that spiritually erodes the core of racist presuppositions he seeks to ‘fix’ his identity upon: for when the Other does not subscribe to the determinism of materialist subhuman ‘objecthood’, western imperialist anthropology finds itself confronted with fundamental potentialities of discontinuity and reacts with an originary dehumanizing violence which is the very condition of its possibility.

George Zimmerman seeks to ground his claim for socio-ontological recognition through greater subservient affinity with established power, and yet such a project is undermined by Trayvon Martin’s assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’, an assertion that introduces a disequilibrium transforming Zimmerman’s initial anonymous gaze of racist alterity into an intersubjective gaze of antagonistic reciprocity. Martin therefore thwarts Zimmerman’s attempts at imperialist legitimacy by refusing to recognize him as synonymous with the objective violence of neo-colonial police force. In the absence of Martin’s recognition of Zimmerman’s attempt at imperialist self-deputization, Zimmerman threatens to impose his biopolitical alignment with Empire through intersubjective violence. Martin vehemently resists Zimmerman, as such, deciding to risk his life asserting Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ and is shot dead.

Righteous human outrage at the biopolitical murder of Trayvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman should not be confused with, or mediated by, the self-righteous chorus of ‘liberal-democratic’ hyperbourgeois embarrassment over a ‘not guilty’ verdict that openly and unapologetically reconfirms the normative gaze of Empire regarding the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ as a ‘biopolitical danger’.

Legally sanctioning George Zimmerman’s murder of Trayvon Martin, aside from granting legitimacy to Zimmerman’s project of seeking socio-ontological self-validation from the topographical coherence of western imperialist power, actually works in tandem with media Spectacle towards reinvigorating American culture through barbaric random lynching as racist praxis that further constitutes a constituent public. Such revivalist American constituency is indicative of a renewed threat to Black community by mainstream citizens of Empire, exercising a savage ethics of imperialist ‘white’ subjectivity-as-mob hegemony through oppressive violence-as-unexceptional when confronted by the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’.

This renewed threat is immediately compounded by the already ominous objective structural-inert violence of ongoing neo-colonial police repression of human ‘being’. For the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ is consistently met with epistemological skepticism and socio-historical brutality intent on suffocating the Promethean soul of an ascendant humanity. For if not kept intellectually docile through imperial mainstream assimilationist ideology, or physically incarcerated by a vast and ever expanding prison industrial complex, Black community throughout the Diaspora constitutes a Trojan Horse of lived potentialities for geonational insurrection-for-itself against Empire.

The normative gaze of western imperialist power divests objective violence from its coercive anonymity upon its Return back to source as emancipatory praxis. As such, the original threat of oppressive violence by George Zimmerman against Trayvon Martin is completely indecipherable by the jury. This, in comparison to Trayvon’s emancipatory exercise of human agency in resistance to such a threat, a response that in asserting Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ is immediately identifiable as illegitimate violence by jurists merely adhering to the ‘Law’ as legal codification of the normative gaze.

Trayvon Martin’s vociferous intersubjective resistance against George Zimmerman’s biopolitical encroachment upon his human ‘being’ profoundly disturbs the imperial mainstream sensibilities of the jurists. Indeed, such emancipatory human agency in resistance against a localized intersubjective manifestation of western imperialist power is still unforgivable when embodied in Black subjectivity.

As an exceptional antagonism, lived Black experience introduces historical disequilibrium within the socio-ontological foundations of modernity. As such, for George Zimmerman or any other savage imbecile intent on nourishing racist reflexivity as an ‘empirical self-as-rational animality’ in constitutive subservience to established unjust global power, there will always be a completely ethical and rational reason to shoot down those of us who, as clearly and conveniently identified by the Raw coloniality of ‘race’, constitute an ever present ‘biopolitical danger’ to a western imperialist continuum. A ‘biopolitical danger’ that must be dealt with at all costs: including an ongoing commitment to the murder of Man as ultimate guarantee of an unjust world order against any ascendant human initiative exercised by the wretched of the earth.

[1]“the white man has enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen.” Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus”, What is Literature? and Other Essays, (Harvard University Press, 1948, 1988) p.291.

[2]“In this regard, Black Americans have a big role to play. They are a Black Trojan Horse within white America . . . ”, Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, (Delta, 1968, 1991) p.152.