The ju­ry's prob­lem­at­ic de­ci­sion on Sat­ur­day night to ac­quit George Zim­mer­man, a se­cu­ri­ty guard who be­came no­to­ri­ous for tak­ing the life of an un­armed black boy in Flori­da, in­evitably and pre­dictably evoked strong emo­tions of anger, hurt, dis­ap­point­ment and sor­row, par­tic­u­lar­ly among peo­ple of African de­scent across the globe.

The pro­lif­er­a­tion of com­ments on so­cial net­works in­di­cates that racial pro­fil­ing, racial dis­crim­i­na­tion and racial­ly-bi­ased le­gal sys­tems will not be tol­er­at­ed by this new gen­er­a­tion of youth. De­spite the neg­a­tive his­tor­i­cal stereo­types sur­round­ing the black male there is a present col­lec­tive con­scious­ness that the black man is not al­ways a per­pe­tra­tor but of­ten times a vic­tim.

In the Caribbean, the black male is of­ten per­ceived as a per­pe­tra­tor of grue­some crimes like sex­u­al abuse, rape, do­mes­tic abuse, rob­bery and mur­der. He is stereo­typed as a crim­i­nal, a gang mem­ber, a gang­ster. But the black Caribbean male is al­so a vic­tim; he is a vic­tim of prob­lem­at­ic con­struc­tions of mas­culin­i­ty, neg­a­tive stereo­types, mar­gin­al­i­sa­tion and in­equal­i­ty. He is a vic­tim of sys­tems, in­sti­tu­tions and gov­ern­ment es­tab­lish­ments in the Caribbean which shirk their re­spon­si­bil­i­ty and place blame on the black man.

We are cer­tain­ly heart­bro­ken be­cause of the le­gal sys­tem which failed Trayvon Mar­tin in the Unit­ed States, but we must al­so be heart­bro­ken as a con­se­quence of sys­tems and in­sti­tu­tions in the Caribbean which on a dai­ly ba­sis fail the black male.

Fay White

Mara­cas Val­ley