I was about to start recording audio for a new .musecast last night when the first tweets about George Zimmerman being found not guilty in the death of Trayvon Martin hit my timeline.

It was in the wake of my first real interest in politics — the 2 Live Crew obscenity trials — that I witnessed the nationwide riots in 1992 after the first criminal trial of the police officers who beat Rodney King resulted in acquittals. I was too young to really appreciate the significance of the riots at the time, but they have always remained one of the most influential national events of my teenage years, possibly more so than the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 1992 presidential election. It’s been hard not to think about that case as coverage of the George Zimmerman trial has swamped television news, especially as it wound down these past few days.

It’s important to remember that the American justice system, like any human creation, comes with the imperfection of those human beings. It is unrealistic to expect that our justice system will get every case right. When the system shows consistent bias, though — when the judicial system of the same state that let George Zimmerman go free put an African-American woman in prison for twenty years merely for firing warning shots at her abusive husband, when the “stand your ground” law that first gained prominence in Florida repeatedly allows whites to get away with killing African-Americans at a shocking disproportionate rate compared to the other way around, there is something deeply, deeply wrong, and only those who have a deep-seated interest in maintaining the status quo — because it creates an air of legitimacy for their prejudices and bigotry — would dare to suggest otherwise.

I wish I could separate the Trayvon Martin case from conservative American politics writ large, but I can’t. A few days ago I finished reading Hubris, Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s near-encyclopaedic account of the intelligence and political manipulations that misled so many Americans into supporting the Iraq War, including the neo-conservative doctrine of preemptive warfare: Because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, they argued, we needed to remove Hussein from power before he killed more Americans in the wake of the 09.11 attacks. (Never mind that Hussein didn’t attack us on 09.1 and didn’t have weapons of mass destruction.) This doctrine still holds incredible weight today, as seen by many Republicans’ arguments that the United States military needs to fully engage in Syria. The “stand your ground” law merely takes that doctrine of preemption and shifts it down to a personal scale: Wherever you are, regardless if whether or not you are actually being threatened, the mere feeling of being threatened is enough to justify the use of deadly force.

Were it not for the obscene knock-knock joke one of Zimmerman’s lawyers started his opening statement with (with Trayvon Martin’s parents in the courtroom forced to listen to his belittlement of their son’s death), and the insulting post-verdict claim by another of his lawyers that the prosecution of Zimmerman was “offencive,” the most galling part of Zimmerman’s defence came when one of his lawyers hefted a slab of concrete and set it in front of the jury, claiming that because Zimmerman encountered Trayvon on concrete, Trayvon was “not unarmed.” By that logic, anyone standing on concrete, or any surface harder than grass, is in possession of a deadly weapon. If that is the standard by which “deadly force” is going to be measured — and the Zimmerman verdict gave that standard a breathtaking degree of legitimacy — then how many of us can be claimed to be “in possession of a deadly weapon” whenever we venture outside of our houses?

As much as I’ve studied the systematic discrimination of African-Americans (and this past year’s teaching has been a real eye-opener in terms of how much of it exists just here in Toledo), I will never really know what that discrimination is like. Even if I have experienced discrimination, and even if the hatred that causes discrimination does, as I believe, stem from the same place regardless of whom is being discriminated against, I will never know what it is like to live as an African-American. What I can say, though, is that if I were a young African-American man living in Florida, I would feel right now as if open season had been declared on me by the George Zimmerman verdict. I would feel as if any white person with any animus against African-Americans could shoot and kill me while I was walking on a sidewalk and claim self-defence.

Is that paranoia? If you want to talk about paranoia, why don’t you start with all the right-wing media out there breeding paranoia in its rabid fanbase, reinforcing their fears that the New Black Panthers are plotting to “kill whitey” everywhere, that President Obama is a secret Muslim/Kenyan/atheist/socialist/etc. hellbent on destroying America, that everything is a giant conspiracy by secular godless liberal perverted commie bastards designed to turn everyone gay and take everyone’s guns and lead to a United Nations-led New World Order with black helicopters and forced prayers to Allah. I wish I could say that was an exaggeration, but it’s not at all off the mark of what is being fed to so many millions of Americans by the Glenn Becks and Infowars.coms out there. Paranoia breeds paranoia, but I’ve yet to hear of one person who was murdered as a result of an ObamaCare provision. The same can’t be said about Trayvon Martin and stand your ground laws.

The important thing to remember about these stand your ground laws is that, like the abortion rights and voting rights restrictions sweeping the land right now, they spread throughout America once they got press in Florida. They are on the books in several states, including here in Ohio. Although I can never know what it is like to be profiled and discriminated against in the way that African-American s so often are in this country, as I have written before, I am often the target of profiling and discrimination based on aspects of my identity as unchangeable as skin colour. I can hardly make a grocery run in the middle of the afternoon without some parent pulling their child away from me as I walk down the aisle because, based on my comportment, I “obviously” must be a pedophile who would love nothing more than to rape their child.

By the groundwork set by stand your ground laws, and the precedent set by the George Zimmerman verdict, what is there to stop any of these parents from claiming that a person like me walking on the hard floor of a grocery store presents a “clear and present threat” to their child, ready to assault the parent and abduct the chlid, and that using deadly force against me, even if I don’t even notice them, isn’t justified under the law? What is there to stop anyone from doing the same to another person because that person “looks gay” (remember, the “gay panic” defence is still not a banned practice in America), or has dark skin, or “looks Muslim,” or wears a bandanna on their head, or shows or displays anything else that the assailant believes (no matter how wrongly) makes that person an immediate threat to them?

There are always going to be those crazy people who go out and kill others without provocation or purpose, and there is little we can do to change that. What we can more profoundly affect is those people who are just begging for any small excuse to execute violence, up to and including killing, people they don’t like, using the flimsiest self-defence excuse they can muster. The threat of murder convictions and long jail sentences is enough to curb the homicidal urges of most of these nutjobs. The verdict in the George Zimmerman trial has set the self-defence bar so low that it’s hard not to believe that racists, homophobes, and others whose hearts are full of bigotry and hatred are not looking at America the day after the verdict and believing that they can now, quite literally, get away with murder.

A woman wearing sexy clothes does not “deserve” to be raped any more than a young African-American man wearing a hoodie “deserves” to be killed, but that is now the justice system we live under. If you’re not in one of the states where a stand your ground law is in effect, it probably will be soon, if not because of the actions of state officials then because of a growing national effort to give people the “freedom” to “defend” themselves. If that is what “freedom” and “self-defence” and “justice” are going to be defined as here in America, then moving to England is looking much more attractive to me than it did twenty-four hours ago.