The Limits of Security, and the Promise Of Hospitality

In a recent New York Times column, Rich Benjamin insightfully describes “the bunker mentality” of America’s gated communities as a significant part of the backdrop to the tragic and much-discussed killing of Trayvon Martin. Benjamin, who spent several years living in and interviewing the (predominantly white) residents of gated housing developments around the country, found among them a disproportionate fear of crime and a view of “outsiders” –particularly the young, poor and non-white — as threats to safety. Benjamin sees these residents’ exaggerated desire for security as being responsible for a vicious cycle of hostility in which like-minded residents “seek shelter from outsiders and whose physical seclusion then worsens paranoid groupthink against outsiders.” Without denying the role of racial stereotyping, he concludes that reducing this situation to a case of racism misses “a more accurate and painful picture” about America’s violent fixation on security. In response to the slogan that “we are all Trayvon,” Benjamin perceptively asks to what extent the United States is also “all George Zimmerman.”

The painful reality to which Benjamin alludes here is not limited to the gated community mentality that he describes in this piece. From our nation’s readiness to go to war and to accept torture as the price of “security,” to the outright xenophobia of certain recent attempts at immigration reform, to the large numbers of American people — and increasingly youth — who are poor or homeless, to the dysfunctional hostility of national politics more generally, public life in the United States today is characterized by suspicion, possessiveness, violence and fear.
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