Thursday was rough day for Blair Fortson.
While the prosecutor in George Zimmerman’s trial was delivering his closing argument, the 22-year-old Clayton State University senior was stuck in a car with his family, driving to Myrtle Beach.
Like much of America, Fortson has been riveted by what happened on the night when Zimmerman shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. For him, the trial is deeply personal, reverberating with all the slights that stung him, growing up in and around Augusta: “I lived around a lot of white folks who don’t view us as people who could go farther than they could.”
Like Forston, Phil Parham has been engrossed in the case. But he sees it through a different lens.
“I try to ignore race, because it is a trap,” said Parham, A 30-year-old law student at Georgia State University. “When you bring up race, you are trying to get into someone’s head to understand motivations. Here you have two guys in one place. Someone instigated it. One of them is dead. It all boils down to that, and what happened between those two.”
Some events — the Rodney King riots, the O.J. Simpson trial — remind us of how powerfully our personal experiences influence the way we perceive the world, and of the degree to which the color of our skin, among many other things, may shape our experience. Parham and Forston are two young Georgia men, both thoughtful, both working to build meaningful lives, both men of goodwill, a few years apart in age, with a far piece between their points of view.
When President Obama said last March, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon,” he might have said, “like Blair.”
Growing up, Forston said, two things he sensed often from white people were low expectations and fear. “The mindset was, we couldn’t achieve what they could achieve,” he said.
Even last year, when he got what could be considered a low-level job to help pay for college – a fork-lift driver – he had to deal with stereotypes.
“They assumed that I was unintelligent — and I was the only one in there who was in college,” said Fortson, who is vice president of Clayton State’s NAACP chapter. “I told my boss one day that I was taking political science classes and could be president one day. The only thing he could say was, ‘Not another one of you.’”
This is one reason he sees guilt all over Zimmerman.
“I feel within the depths of my heart that George Zimmerman is guilty. I do not feel that the death of Trayvon Martin was a result of self-defense of any type,” Fortson said. “Zimmerman was a coward and his ignorance of (black people) caused him to shoot Trayvon. He was afraid.”
And that, he said, “reflects the plight of the African-American male in our country.”
Parham grew up in Savannah with dreams of being an actor. He still dabbles a bit, but at 30, he decided it might be better to go to law school than to wait tables.
“It is interesting to look at a case like this and get a little taste of the law and see procedure at work,” he said. It’s especially interesting to contrast this experience with his memories of the Simpson trial, “when I was naive to what the law was.”
“As a law student, I look at the case differently than I would have looked at it even a year ago,” he said. “Now I am looking at evidence. Does it meet all of the standards?”
Parham was 12 (and Forston was 4) in 1995 when a jury found O.J. Simpson not guilty in the savage murder of his wife. That trial set the stage for the endless parade of sensational trials that are a staple of cable news, bloggers and social media.
“This case is indicative of the media hyping things up. It is a reflection of America’s obsession with courtroom drama,” Parham said. “This is not the trial of the century. Not even close. We had Bernie Madoff, Michael Jackson, which is going on now.”
In his view, there’s little to distinguish the Zimmerman case from any incident in which two people come into conflict and one is killed. “Why is this case more important than 100 other, similar cases? I don’t know.”
Yet, he watched. Not for the voyeurism of it, but rather to learn. He watched the judge. The defense. The prosecution. The witnesses. Even how Zimmerman presented himself.
“I love being an armchair juror,” Parham said.
And he knows he’ll never lack for opportunities. “After O.J., we discovered that crime sells. So when they’re done with this one, they will latch on to the next one. I am waiting for the Aaron Hernandez trial.”
For Forston, though, it’s all about this trial, this death, and living life as a young black man.
“In most cases, people like George Zimmerman see us and simply assume we are dangerous or threatening,” Fortson said. “We are subject stereotypes, misread, mis-educated and severely mistaken. My hope for this case is that it sets us on the path towards being recognized for everything that we truly are.”
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