by Tom Pantera
Columnist

It’s shaping up to be another dreary, depressing month for race relations in this country.

I kind of thought George Zimmerman would at least be convicted of manslaughter, but when the verdict finally came down Saturday night it somehow wasn’t surprising. Given how the court system works, such results are inevitable. It’s yet more proof, as if we needed any, of Clarence Darrow’s old dictum: There is no justice, in or out of court.

I think I know what happened, just based on my personal experience and Occam’s Razor, the rule that says the simplest explanation that fits all the facts is likely to be the accurate one. You had a young black kid walking back from the store. He was unfortunately spotted by the neighborhood blowhard/superhero wannabe who, fortified by the pistol stuck in his pants, was going to give the little thief what-for. With no provocation other than the kid’s appearance, he confronted him. The kid – who, at 17, was probably both weirded out and scared – did what he could to deal with the situation, but things degenerated, there was a scuffle and the gun came out of Zimmerman’s pants.

The thing is, we’ve all known somebody who exhibits the same kind of behavior Zimmerman did. When I was a security guard, the guy I worked for was a rent-a-cop right out of central casting. It used to set my teeth on edge to watch him deal with young people; his body mass would immediately migrate from his gut to his chest and his whole demeanor reminded me of every bully you’ve ever met (and he was a bully, both professionally and personally). And this was a guy who actually had some legal authority to bully people; Zimmerman is the more dangerous kind, since there are virtually no controls when he feels like asserting his manhood.

And yes, there was some racism involved (although it’s being called by the less loaded term “profiling”), and when you mix that with a little man like George Zimmerman, the combination can be explosive.

Now you can say I’m completely talking through my hat here, but I don’t think I am. My lifetime has exposed me to too many people who are like George Zimmerman and to too many situations where such a reaction is likely. It’s not that complicated an event.

What’s really depressing in a sort of fundamental way, though, is that the Zimmerman verdict exposes the justice system for what it is: a flawed, imperfect attempt not to find out what really happened in a situation, but what is provable about what happened.

It took me years of covering law enforcement and courts to understand why that is. The justice system begins with the assumption that we’re never going to be able to determine with 100 percent accuracy what happened in any given situation. The most we can do is set up the best procedure possible to try to do that. All we can do is try.

And occasionally, when it comes to Zimmerman or O.J. Simpson or Casey Anthony or any other high-profile failing of the system, the hardest try in the world comes to naught. And when you add race to the mix, that failure becomes worse. Of course, any right-winger reading this will accuse me of being a “liberal racist” by saying that, but denying that race had nothing to do with Trayvon Martin’s killing takes a pretty strong effort to ignore reality.

In the end, while there is a lot of systemic blame to go around – by all accounts, Florida’s “stand your ground” law is a pretty badly written piece of legislation – race is going to trump everything else, because this is one of those eras in American history that racism is at the root of many of our problems.

And the problem with racism is that it isn’t always as dramatic as some white bully plugging a black kid for the crime of being on the street after dark. Racism has become so acceptable that minor forms of it hardly draw a reaction. On the same weekend as the Zimmerman verdict, a San Francisco TV station deeply embarrassed itself by giving wrong names for the pilots of the Korean jetliner that crashed there – names that a junior high kid would have recognized as fake, because they were on about that level of sophistication. And CBS announced it would run a disclaimer at the beginning of “Big Brother” distancing the network from racist comments made by a contestant on the show. It’s apparently still going to air the comments, though.

The thing is, we don’t take racism seriously in this country. Paula Deen can defend her use of arguably the most offensive word in the language because, she said, she’s from the South and she is what she is. That Big Brother contestant will still get her 15 minutes of fame; hell, she might get more than that if, like many such people, she works the right-wing “we’re the real victims” speech circuit.

And after a couple of weeks of high-running feelings, we’ll forget all about George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin and go back to getting the vapors about things like celebrity deaths.

I used to think that maybe racism would finally peter out in my lifetime, but I don’t think it’s going to (and not just because I don’t have a lot of decades left). Most of us know what racism is, but the same cottage industry that’s coalesced around blaming the poor for their poverty and portraying women who seek abortions as sluts who do it for birth control will continue to saddle up whenever morally wrong actions need some justification. I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that society is simply too dysfunctional to do anything about it.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. But I have a nagging fear that a lot of people, including a fair number of black teen-agers, are going to die needlessly before anything happens. I really hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am.