As Wayne County jurors weighs the fate of Theodore Wafer, who fatally shot Renisha McBride on his porch in Dearborn Heights last November, Brian Dickerson writes in the Free Press, it’s important to understand that its verdict won't be a referendum on Metro Detroit race relations.
Yes, McBride was a black teenager from Detroit. And yes, Wafer is a middle-aged white man, one whose suburban home straddles a shifting demographic fault line where whites, blacks and immigrants from the three continents share working-class challenges and a sense of post-industrial anomie. . . .
But it’s crucial to remind ourselves that every bit of this cultural baggage is borne not by the principals in the Dearborn Heights drama, but by those of us who have watched it unfold. There simply is no evidence whatsoever that either McBride’s bizarre behavior that morning or Wafer’s explosive reaction to it was a function of their racial difference. . . .
But whether or not Wafer’s reaction was reasonable or proportionate, it is undisputed that he was reacting to McBride, not the other way around. That sharply distinguishes McBride’s death from that of Trayvon Martin, who appears to have been minding his own business when a neighborhood watch coordinator named George Zimmerman began trailing him in a gated community near Sanford, Fla.
Martin ostensibly attracted Zimmerman’s attention because he was black; McBride attracted Wafer’s attention because she sought it, urgently, at 4:30 in the morning.
