Introduction

The call for this Special Issue was simple yet poignant. It read,

On February 26, 2012 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot dead by 28-year-old George Zimmerman, as he walked home through the gated community neighborhood in which he was visiting his father’s fiancé. Invoking Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, Zimmerman claimed he was threatened by the presence of the unarmed African-American high school student wearing a hooded sweatshirt. News of the shooting, and the racially charged court case and media coverage that ensued—in which Zimmerman was acquitted of charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges—captivated the nation. Impassioned statements by President Barack Obama and social media protests by NBA stars Dwayne Wade and LeBron James, as well as the Howard University School of Medicine, soon followed. Yet we should not be surprised of the jury’s decision to acquit Zimmerman. W.E.B. Du Bois once wrote, “Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of a crime.” Du Bois wrote that in 1932, but his words ring just as true some 82 years later. And that, the timeless poignancy and accuracy of the utterance, is a crime, a stain on our nation’s soul; a residue of race-resentment and inequity that lingers—not only as a stain but an odor in the air.

In this special issue, we seek to open a conversation about the historical processes and exigencies that “lead to a situation in which a young man who is taking a break from the NBA All-Star Game goes on a snack run and doesn’t make it home” (Coates, 2013). For we know that this goes beyond Martin and Zimmerman; it goes beyond the Florida legal system; it goes beyond the infotainment cable news coverage of the case. It spans the historical arc from Emmett Till’s murder in 1955 to the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012. And know the names well: Sean Bell, Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, Oscar Grant, The Jena Six, Rodney King and the politicized constructions that regulate human social behavior—or maybe just race-relations: Stop-and-Frisk, Stand-Your Ground, racial profiling, discriminatory housing practices, political assassination, raced character assassination, etc. At the same time, it is a narrative that exists beyond the historical present to one rooted in our national heritage, our national founding: colonialism; slavery; the Civil War; Jim Crow; segregation; economic apartheid; white privilege.

******

Michael Giardina and Norman Denzin shaped the original call for this Special Issue, and it has been my pleasure to receive and cull through a diverse group of submissions. I want to further frame and contextualize this call and the results in a historical necessity to question racism and the effects of its engagement. Allow me this moment of extended citation to make a point. In the introduction to the now classic collection of essays, The House That Race Built, Wahneema Lubiano (1998) wrote,

The essays gathered here were produced by a group of scholars who answered a call sent by myself and several of my colleagues at Princeton University, including Toni Morrison, Cornel West, and Arnold Rampersad, to address the issue of race and black Americans on the ground of the United States. It was necessary, many of us thought, to mark again, in the present moment, a recognition that the basic character of the United States not only harbored, but depended upon, a profound violation of the spirit of democracy, and that that fundamental violation is racism. Central to the existence of racism is the politics of its denial. It is in the best interests of the right to assert the nonexistence of racism except as a manifestation of individual pathology—a matter simply of individuals with bad attitudes. But it is the shame of liberals who think of themselves as guardians and witnesses of corrective concern and conscience that they too have elected to treat racism as a problem of individual social relations and not the systematic operation of power at work throughout our political economy. These essays call into question and to account a liberal majority that trivializes racism by turning its attention to individual remedies, to attitude adjustments, to “color-blind” legal adjudication. (pp. vii-viii)

Lubiano concludes her short introduction by writing,

This book tries to offer decisive change in the work of antiracism by providing a sample of some of the best new thinking on the subject of race. Finally, this book attempts to foster, in clear and forceful terms, the recognition that we are at a moment in which a consolidation of forces is working to roll back real gains made in racial democracy in recent years. It argues that we are currently in the midst of a dangerous reconsolidation of white racial nationalism and racial domination taking place under new and quasi-respectable ideologies. These developments can only harden that state of racial apartheid already in effect in this country. (p. ix)

Lubiano’s call, then, is a painful reminder, now, of the necessity of such continued dialogue—always pivoting on the politics and a/effects of racism, always a resistive act against racial apartheid, and always a reminder (then and now) of how central to the existence of racism is the politics of its denial, a reverse adjudication of virtue which plays so prominently in the George Zimmerman case and the abject body of Trayvon Martin as effigy during the trial, in the national headlines, and in social media.

The call of the “Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin” Special Issue in Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies was responded to by contributors from varying disciplines including Speech Communication, Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, Education and Curriculum Reform; Education, Culture, and Society; Conflict Analysis and Resolution, Sports Management, Journalism, Mass Communication; Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Theater and Film Studies. In their submissions, authors bring forth the rigor of their disciplines, the might of their intellectual fervor, the passions of their convictions, the clarity of their articulate voices, and the outrage of their critical citizenship to address the call, and particularly the historical repeat happening of a “Martin vs. Zimmerman” type-case in these the United States of America.

The authors speak in voices that echo the embattled cry of historical civil rights leaders (e.g., Martin, Malcolm, Jessie, Stokely, etc.) and the canonical scholars included in The House That Race Built. Sometimes they write in the objectified academese of scholarly research and analysis, sometimes the thick descriptive reading of cultural practice, and other times in the self-reflexive tones of autoethnographic expression that narrates cultural experience through the implicated body in question. Not just through the objectified, abjectified, and absented Black male bodies of Emmett Till or Trayvon Martin (and countless others), but the bodies authoring these essays—bodies yearning for change, bodies that willingly place themselves on the line on the pages of this Special Issue and on the stage of this historical happening—as an act of defiance, an act of activism, an act of resistance to the persistence of such happenings. In their own unique ways, the authors engage in critical social theory to address this call.

Using D. Soyini Madison’s (2005) notion of employing critical social theory in analysis, the authors articulate and identify hidden forces and ambiguities that operate beneath appearances of the Zimmerman case and, more importantly, what happened to Trayvon Martin. The authors use their critical intellect to guide judgment and evaluation emanating from our discontent with the happening and the verdict. The authors direct our attention to the critical expression within different interpretive communities relative to their unique symbol systems, customs, and codes to understand the multiple discourses, investments and divestments of the case, and the cultural response to the happening. The authors use their critical intellect and articulate tongues to demystify the ubiquity and magnitude of power at play in this historical happening. In their impassioned and scathingly articulate rhetorics of protest, the authors name and analyze what is intuitively felt without giving into unreflective analysis of the evidence. And each author provides the reader insight and inspires acts of justice as a recovery of the past and a corrective for the future.

The responding essays to this call circulate around four primary themes: (a) Historical Locations: Placement, Positionality, and Performativities Against the Black Body (Male and Female); (b) Media Influences, Effects, and Promotions That Aggravate the Social Consciousness to Promote and Confirm Theories of Racism; (c) Legal Proceduralisms of the Trial and Existing U.S. Laws That Leads to the Failure of Fairness in the Judicial System; and (d) Dialogues, Monologues, and the Politics of the Personal. At first glance these categories may seem fixed, but as a reader you will begin to see when the borders bleed, both in a shared intimacy of intentionality across essays and in the literal ways in which the tragedy and travesty of such cases, Emmett Till to Trayvon, reveal the continued flow of suffering—racism with the visibility and stench of blood calling us all to action.

The two essays that frame this special collection were presented on a panel of a similar title at the 10th International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry (May 2014) that I had the pleasure of serving as discussant. The work presented by Ronald L. Jackson II (co-authored with Murali Balaji) and Wanda S. Pillow ignited a vibrant conversation at the Qualitative Inquiry (QI) conference, and the voices and vivaciousness of the participating audience members, in that room, on that day, are present in differing ways within this Special Issue. The work of these presenters are appropriate bookends to the collective discussion at the conference and the contributions of the authors in this Special Issue (e.g., Michelle Cowin-Mensah, Aisha Durham, Kelly Macías, Sanford Richmond, Karen Jean Martinson, Gennifer Jackson, Ed Madison, Stephen Dillon, Allison Page, Joshua Reeves, Caroline Light, Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Michele Eodice, Meta G. Carstarphen, Phyllis Bernard, T. Elon Dancy II, Sherri Irvin, Keith L. Humphrey, Owen Kulemeka, Ben Keppel, Greg Graham, Kirsten Edwards, Ralph Beliveau, and Marlon McPhatter). The first contribution speaks through a critical cultural framework, and the last contribution speaks through the grounded impact on the lives and fears of young Black men, and the diverse women who mother them. It is my hope that this Special Issue furthers the much-needed conversation about race, rights, resistance, and respect; an antidote to the roll back of real gains made in racial democracy in recent years.