(Salon.Com)  Since Florida cannot defend black life against white fear, the question now is: How should black people respond?

How much more are black people in this country supposed to take?

On Saturday, a Florida jury failed to convict Michael Dunn for the callous murder of Jordan Davis. Though he was convicted of three counts of attempted murder and also on a gun charge, a mistrial was declared for the first-degree murder charge. He will face substantial jail time – perhaps up to 75 years on the four charges for which he was found guilty.

Prosecutor Angela Corey has also publicly declared her intent to seek retrial on the murder conviction. However, she is the same prosecutor who oversaw the Zimmerman murder trial and failed to get a conviction.

She is the same prosecutor who has overzealously prosecuted Marissa Alexander, for firing a warning shot into the wall to scare off her violent ex-husband. The Alexander case is the only case of the three for which she has gotten a conviction, and though Alexander has been granted a new trial, Corey intends yet again to send her to prison for 20 years for a crime that harmed no one.

Therefore, I don’t trust Corey. It is clear that Florida prosecutors are fairly unclear about how to defend black life against an onslaught of white murder.

Yes, I know that Jordan’s killer may spend the rest of his life in prison. But this is not about jail time.

This case, like the case of Trayvon Martin, hinges on whether white fear legally outweighs and is therefore more legally defensible than black life.  The day before Jordan Davis would have turned 19 years old, a court failed to affirm the value of his life, his right to exist in space enjoying music with his friends, his right not to be harassed by someone while doing something as mundane as sitting in a parking lot at a gas station.  […]

I teach college students, and in the hopefulness and optimism of their youth, they are often quick to point out that racial politics are so “different in their generation.” But what I see is black students their age being murdered unceremoniously in locales throughout the country, by white or non-black men, who receive insufficient justice for their crimes.

Despite a belief in progress, this moment suggests that young black men’s audacity to exist is a capital offense punishable by murder.

And to be clear, this is not about the music Jordan Davis and his friends were listening to. The global dominance of hip-hop music and the often crass depictions of black life in which hip-hop artists traffic have made it an easy target and scapegoat for white racial anxiety. But white racial anxiety –and in particular the alleged legitimacy of it – is a foregone conclusion searching for facts.

In this era, those “facts” seem to be readily available in endless media depictions of violent black males. In the post-Reconstruction era, those “facts” could be found in the swiftness of black progress during Reconstruction. During the tumultuous first half of the 20th century, those “facts” could be found in the audacity of black people’s desire to vote, share equal space on sidewalks, be paid fair wages, and eat at the same lunch counters.

Black being is the problem. Not black thuggery. Black boys officially exist in a state of social death, because the law continues to tell us that their lives, when taken by white men, are legally indefensible. They have been rendered by the law dead men walking. It’s no wonder then that in so many places they act like it.  White thuggery, meanwhile, marches on, mowing down black folks at every turn, white sheets, sight unseen.  (read more)