That's the question posed by Rich Benjamin in a recent NYT op-ed titled, "The Gated Community Mentality", and I think it is spot-on.
Benjamin spent several years living in predominately white communities while researching his book ("Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey into the Heart of White America")
Based on this experience, he's brought these insights to bear on the Trayvon Martin case, concluding, ultimately:
Those reducing this tragedy to racism miss a more accurate and painful picture. Why is a child dead? The rise of "secure", gated communities, private cops, private roads, private parks, private schools, private playgrounds--private, private, private--exacerbates biased treatment against the young, the colored and the presumably poor.
In public discussion and debate about the Trayvon Martin tragedy, an inordinate focus has been placed on compiling an accurate account of just what went down that Florida day in February. And it's been a painful moment for all of us--on many different levels.
But Rich Benjamin's question
While the youth's declare in solidarity "We are all Trayvon," ... to what extent is the United States also all George Zimmerman?"
is painful in a different way because--whether we seek shelter in a "gated community," or "master-planned community" or a "secluded intimate neighborhood"--we all want to live in a place where we are safe.
On some level, regardless where we live, we know, too, though, that there are certain unsafe spaces in our country--shall we call them "tracts of land"? shall we call them "ghettos"? or shall we just call them "the Hood"?--where all men and women fear to tread. Whatever we call them, author and professor of criminal justice Paul Leighton locates them on the landscape our internal safeness scales:
The larger society is quite removed from the grim life circumstances and daily degradations experienced by poor blacks, and hence the average American has little real feeling for the forces that shape their lives. Much of the destruction of black life occurs in urban ghettos. Not unlike their counterparts in Nazi-occupied Europe, these ghettos are a no-man's land to people from the larger society. These environments are, in fact, the functional equivalent of prisons; people in these oppressive settings desperately want out, and those who make it out to better worlds desperately want to stay out. Few people visit ghettos willingly, unless they have relatives there; even fewer aspire to reside there if other choices are available. As a result, the indirect causal chain that ends with systematically high rates of mortality in these invisible ghettos can be hard for outsiders—the larger society—to appreciate. Here, death flows not from gas chambers and state-sponsored torture but from lives marked by deprivation and desperation.
We all know these things. We also know that there is a contingent of racist Fucks in this country. We know that these folks are a lethal threat to the nation, on many levels. The nationwide protests, the press, the petitions and outpouring of support generated by this incident are all good. And should continue, relentlessly.
But we also know that the lives most at risk in this country are the lives of the people living in the Hood/s. We need to focus our attentions not on eliminating the "Hood"--not everyone can move to the burbs, and a lot of us wouldn't want to. We need to focus instead on making these "land tracts"--most of which are centrally located urban sites--habitable. And safe.
We need to create conditions in these communities that sustain life, not deprivation and desperation--otherwise, it seems, yeah, we may all be George Zimmerman. We just want to be safe.