Stuff White People Know (or: What We Talk About When We Talk About Trayvon)

The killing of Trayvon Martin is easily placed in the long history of American violence against black people and amidst the related contemporary institutions that reproduce race as a structure of inequality. For that reason, both the broad outpouring of horror that the case generated when it first rose to national prominence and the polarization that soon followed pose puzzles about how white Americans understand racial subordination. This essay explores those puzzles, taking moments in the struggle over the meaning of the case as occasions that illuminate the forms of knowing and unknowing that mark white supremacy in a neoliberal era.