Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics

(Paperback)

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On February 26, 2012, seventeen-year-old African American male Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a twenty-eight-year-old white Hispanic American male in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman killed Martin in a gated community. Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics, featuring a new preface by editors George Yancy and Janine Jones written after the June 2013 trial, examines the societal conditions that fueled the shooting and its ramifications for race relations and violence in America. Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics attempts to capture what a critical cadre of scholars think about this potentially volatile situation in the moment. The text addresses issues across various thematic domains that are both broad and relevant. Pursuing Trayvon Martin is an important read for scholars in the fields of philosophy, criminal justice, history, critical race theory, political science, critical philosophies of race, gender studies, sociology, rhetorical studies, and for anyone hungry for critical ways of thinking about the Trayvon Martin case.

Reviews

'Wrong time, wrong place' goes the classic expression. But the problem is that if youre 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. -- Charles W. Mills, CUNY Graduate Center
The chapters in Pursuing Trayvon Martin are written from a wide and diverse range of disciplinary perspectives: womens studies, religious studies, criminology and criminal justice, Africana studies, philosophy, and psychology. . . . [One of] Pursuing Trayvon Martins strengths [is] its exhaustiveness in its thematic and analytical scope and the diversity of its authors and their approaches. . . . Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics will serve as an important point of reference as we continue in our struggle to understand this horrendous tragedy. Each piece begins a conversation that we should be on the alert for further development in a range of different fora. Yancy and Jones are to be commended for beginning this conversation and for their astute solicitation of work. The texts scope, conceptual innovativeness, and thematic breadth give the work an archival quality. . . . This text honors the memory of Trayvon Martin. * APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience *

Author Bio

George Yancy is associate professor of philosophy at Duquesne University. He has authored, edited, and coedited seventeen books. Janine Jones is associate professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.