Pursuing Trayvon Martin

George Yancy is associate professor of philosophy at Duquesne University. He is the author of Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race (2008) and Look, a White! Philosophical Essays on Whiteness (2012). Yancy is the editor of over twelve books and has published articles in a variety of scholarly journals. In 2012, he was nominated for the Duquesne University Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarship.Janine Jones is associate professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is interested in philosophical topics and problems where race and gender, philosophy of mind, language, epistemology, and metaphysics intersect. She is the author of “Illusory Possibilities and Imagining Counterparts” Acta Analytica (2004), “The Impairment of Empathy in Goodwill Whites” in What White Looks Like, ed. George Yancy, Routledge (2004), and Racialized Embodiment in Racialized Realms (Forthcoming Suny).

'Wrong time, wrong place' goes the classic expression. But the problem is that if you’re the wrong race, any time and place can be wrong. Under white supremacy, the black body brings its own wrongness with it, rewriting the rules for what counts as reasonable suspicion, standing your ground, and justifiable self-defense. These urgent and timely essays on the Trayvon Martin killing expose in unflinching detail the racialized norms of white social cognition, and why justice demands their revision.

• About the ContributorsIntroductionChapter 1: Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Magic Tricks of White Supremacy in the U.S. Chapter 2: Imagined Communities: Whitopia and the Trayvon Martin TragedyChapter 3: Indignity and Death: Philosophical Commentary on White Terror, Black Death and the Trayvon Martin TragedyChapter 4: No Bigots Required: What the Science of Racial Bias Reveals in the Wake of Travyon MartinChapter 5: Two Forms of Transcendence: Justice and the Problem of Knowledge in the Trayvon Martin CaseChapter 6: The Irreplaceability of Continued StruggleChapter 7: Dead Black Man, Just WalkingChapter 8: Distorted Vision and Deadly Speech: Enabling Racial Violence through Paradox and ScriptChapter 9: “Seeing Black” through Michel Foucault’s Eyes: “Stand Your Ground” Laws as an Anchorage Point for State-Sponsored RacismChapter 10: Should Black Kids Avoid Wearing Hoodies?Chapter 11: Can We Imagine This Happening to a White Boy?Chapter 12: A Mother’s Pain: The Toxicity of the Systemic Disease of Devaluation Transferred from the Black Mother to the Black Male Child Chapter 13: Social Presence, Visibility, and the Eye of the Beholder: A Phenomenology of Social EmbodimentChapter 14: Trayvon Martin, Racism, and the Dilemma of the African American ParentChapter 15: Refusing Blackness-as-Victimization: Trayvon Martin and the Black CyborgsChapter 16: Politics, Moral Identity, and the Limits of White SilenceChapter 17: Trayvon Martin and the Tragedy of the New Jim CrowChapter 18: “What Are You Doing Around Here?”:Trayvon Martin and the Logic of Black GuiltChapter 19: Trayvon Martin: When Effortless Grace is Sacrificed on the Altar of the ImageCoda: Through the eyes of a mother: Reflections on the rites of passage of black boyhood