Zimmerman’s Gun and the Idolatry Of Our Time

Alton Sterling and Philando Castil are only the most recent victims of the anti-black terrorism so prevalent in the United States. For the descendants of black slaves forcibly brought to America against their will, the violence they continue to experience is recurring and unending.  Blacks live in a world of complete horror in which they have to endure constant police killings and watch as the judicial system lets the murderers of black people off without any punishment.

With the dawn of cell phone cameras, these killings are now widely shared on social media, becoming public spectacles. Even as all evidence points to clear abuse by police officers, the judicial system continues to protect them. The problem is much larger than policy brutality; blacks have to deal with an entire structure that devalues black life and renders it worthless.  George Zimmerman’s killing of Travyon Martin is a clear example of this.

George Zimmerman—not content with merely killing Trayvon Martin—in his latest act of depravity, auctioned  off the gun utilized to kill Trayvon Martin. According to traditional market theory,  a used as opposed to a new gun should have sold for far less than the price Zimmerman initially purchased it for. Yet, this traditional market theory ignores one crucial point: the gun was utilized to kill  a black man.  Zimmerman eventually garnered  $250,000 from his sale. Make no mistake about it: the value attached to the gun  came from the fact that it was utilized to kill a black person, otherwise it would have been simply another gun sold at market value.

This demonstrates that in the American free-market liberal economy, killing a black person with a weapon is able to actually a viable way to increase its value and reap profit. The $250,000 Zimmerman reaped from the selling of the gun, with the average income of a black American being only $18,406, means that Zimmerman has earned $231,594 more than the average black American makes in a year as a reward for slaying an innocent black man. In killing Trayvon Martin and selling the gun from the crime, George Zimmerman has made himself more economically well-off than the average black American.

Zimmerman’s action is merely a technologically updated version of a common ritualistic practice in American society: historically, the gruesome lynchings of black people would be accompanied with images of smiling white faces jostling for a better view in the photograph.

Souvenirs would be sold from the dead bodies of lynched black bodies from their arms, their legs, and even their genitals. The images of dead black bodies would be commodified and turned into postcards and stamps that would be sold throughout America.

George Zimmerman was not a registered police officer but assumed the role of a cop. In his interview with Sean Hannity, George Zimmerman stated that the killing was ”God’s will.”  As Calvin Warren  indicates that Zimmerman believes in a god that considers the deaths of black people to be a holy act; this killing was a manifestation of his religious beliefs. But what exactly is this religion?

In  Christian Atheism: The Only Response Worth Its Salt to the Zimmerman Verdict, Kameron Carter  examines the implications of the Zimmerman verdict and raises a profound theological question,” who is this god in whose name Zimmerman acted under the cover of law on that dusky Florida night?”  The answer to this question is white-western God man.   The fact is white supremacy is the idolatry, or what in Arabic is called the “Shirk,” of our time.

In Surah Ikhlas in the Qu’ran, it is made clear that the true Divine Creator, Allah(SWT), is completely unlike his creation and that  anthropomorphic  conceptions of the divine are shirk. In Islam, shirk constitutes an unforgivable sin.

In  Islam and the Blackamerican : Looking toward the Third Resurrection: Looking toward the Third Resurrection by Dr. Sherman Jackson, critiques the social political realities that can emanate from shirk.  Dr. Jackson indicates that white supremacy is a system of domination that idolizes white people as a second creator. Essentially, white supremacy can be understood as a system in the ways white western man has attempted to elevate itself to the level of God through expelling blackness to the non-human world.

This structure, which undergirds American society, is based upon  the following pillars: the deification of white western man: no God deserves to be worshiped but the white man, anti-black violence as god’s will,  the preservation and elevation of white life above all others, and the perpetual confinement of black people to the position of the slave.

In the time  before the Prophet Muhammad, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, the Jahiliyah Arabs would financially profit from having commoners  pay to  visit the idols devoted to false gods. In the contemporary  era, the  gun used to kill Travyon Martin has become an idol, a symbol of worship devoted to the false idol deity of white western man.

When whiteness plays idolatry with God it leads to its religious  adherents choosing who deserve to live and die. The killing of black people becomes normal and justified. Unless, we begin to structurally  challenge this idolatry , this madness will continue.