Remember Preston Brown? He is the senior lifeguard at the Theodore Young Community Center, where I go for my daily swim. For a long time, Preston and I have been joking around about current events, joking with a serious punch. I play the role of the privileged white liberal, he, the skeptical black man. We first developed our parts in a year-long confrontation over the Obama candidacy. The skeptical Preston laughed at my conviction that Obama would be the Democratic nominee, and he thought it was absolutely hysterical that I thought that Americans would likely elect either a black man or a white woman to be President. As I have reported here, we made a couple of bets, which became the source of general community interest, and which Preston, to the surprise of many, paid up. We had a nice lunch at Applebee’s. It ironically, but presciently, ended with a small racist gesture coming from our waiter. We celebrated together, and we sadly noted that while things had changed, the change had its limits.

As a participant observer of Solidarność in Poland, the great social movement that significantly contributed to the end of Communism around the old Soviet bloc, I appreciate limited revolutions. Solidarność called for a self-limiting revolution. Perhaps this is even the time that I should approve of Lenin: “two steps forward, one step back.” Yet, I must admit, I have been disappointed with the stubborn and sometimes very ugly persistence of open racism after the momentous election of President Obama. While I think there is more to the Tea Party than racism, the calls to “take our country back” and the refusal of many to recognize Obama’s legitimacy have been extremely unsettling. Preston’s skeptical view was wrong about the majority of Americans, but he was right about a significant minority. And his concerns have a lot to do with the recent doings in Sanford, Florida.

Yesterday, Preston and I had a brief discussion about Trayvon Martin, which revealed to me, once again, how it is that race is a very real and persistent fact of American life, and why it is that we have so many problems with it.

When I entered the pool area, Preston called out to me, “they got your guy in Florida,” kidding that Zimmerman somehow was my guy. He was trying to get me to engage in conversation, distracting me from my primary task at hand (getting in an hour’s swim, a bit less than two miles) providing for himself some distraction from looking at the pool for hours. I had a little extra time, so I went over since we hadn’t yet talked about the Trayvon Martin controversy.

I told him how terrible I thought the killing was, how horrible it is that we live in a country where such a thing is not only possible, but likely. I confessed to him how I particularly felt badly for Trayvon’s parents, and the parents of young black men more generally, revealing my age and despair, and my recognition that this is something that I did not have to go through as a parent.

He responded by pointing out to me that most young black men who are killed are killed by other young black men. And he continued, the problem is something that we can’t ignore and must address.

I then agreed but pointed out that recognizing that problem doesn’t diminish the troubling racism that was probably at the root of Zimmerman’s identification of Martin as a threat and Zimmerman killing Martin, and the police acceptance of Zimmerman’s account. He agreed.

On that note, I reminded Preston that I wanted to swim for an hour and that the lap session ended in exactly sixty minutes. I suggested that he could allow me to swim into his break, but he would have nothing to do with that.

Our exchange was short and to the point. It was based on mutual good will and respect, which comes from our shared experience. I think it is important to note that if he made my argument and I made his, the meaning of the exchange would have been exactly the opposite of what it was. Instead of being two people talking against racism, it would have been a conversation of two people constituting racism’s persistence. There is a complex relationship between text and context in the exchange, and our mutual understanding is built upon an awareness of this, and our willingness to say things that are hard to say, especially Preston’s recognition of the problem of violent young black men. It is a question of the interaction between who can say what, what they must say and how the must say it, as Irit Dekel explored in her post about Guenter Grass’s controversial poem “What Must Be Said,” and as is implied in my reflections on Poles and Jews.

This is how I interpret the importance of the national protests calling for justice in this case, including “The Million Hoodies March” just outside my New School office, which I observed first hand. That the mobilized included people from different walks of life, young and old, black and white, was crucial. Their co-presence publicly represented at least the beginning of the kind of conversations that Preston and I and many others are having.

These are the two sides of race and racism in America. There are the hateful racists to be sure, those who make racist comments about our President and fight to get their country back, but much more common and difficult is the racism that informs George Zimmerman and the Sanford police’s decision to take his unlikely story completely seriously to the point of not seeing probable cause. And then there are the people who try to work the complexities out, difficult as this is, with no silver bullet, including the election of an African American President.

During two weeks under Morocco’s sheltering skies, one loses a granulated sense of current American civil discourse. Sipping mint tea in the souks of Marrakesh, the world filtered through the International Herald Tribune, it appeared that Iranian nuclear policy, gas prices, and the health care challenge were sucking up American discursive oxygen. I was vaguely aware that a teenager had been shot in a small town in Florida, but across the ocean that seemed like a routine tragedy in a nation awash in firearms. Teens are often shot and often shooters.

Within hours of touching down at JFK, I learned that the killing (or, some insist, the murder) of Trayvon Martin in Deland, Florida, constituted that now-common spark that creates a blaze in the public sphere. As is so common when the insistent force of the image outruns mundane evidence, people were making forceful pronouncements, selectively parsing the facts of the incident. Trayvon was transformed from a Skittles-eating kid to a talking point. Anytime an adolescent dies, we should weep, but should we pounce?

As many have noted, from Attorney General Eric Holder on down, Americans have great difficulty – perhaps cowardice – in discussing the pathologies and the possibilities of racial contact. Even our president is palpably anxious behind his bully pulpit. So rather than discussing the broad structural challenges of race relations we often rely on idiosyncratic moments, often tragic ones: Bernard Goetz, the subway vigilante; the dragging death of James Byrd; the wilding attack on the Central Park jogger; and, of course, OJ. Now we discuss the shooting death of young African-American Trayvon Martin in a suburban gated community. Each of these instances is a rare and atypical moment, but they are magnified to reveal pervasive racial animosities and resentments. And frequently what we believe is at some remove from how the events evolved.

The jury is still out on Trayvon’s shooting, or perhaps with more accuracy the jury hasn’t yet been called in. But on that evening of February 26^th, 17-year-old Trayvon, wearing a hoodie, was returning to his father’s home in a gated community in Deland, where neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman noticed him and felt that he was acting suspiciously. As things transpired – we know not how, precisely – Trayvon died from a gunshot wound, and Zimmerman is in hiding, not arrested but under moral assault. With the details trickling out, the story became curiouser. Despite the reputation of gated communities as redoubts of the white elite, Zimmerman is Hispanic (sometimes snidely described as “white Hispanic”) and Trayvon’s father is black. Both reside in this gated community, which is perhaps a positive sign of a sort.

As information was released, neither Martin nor Zimmerman was a paragon. In 2005 Zimmerman was charged with resisting arrest with violence and battery on an officer, a charge that was dropped. Trayvon had been suspended several times from high school with indications of drug use and perhaps burglary. While this background does not determine what happened that February night, imperfection rules. Together the two created a complex puzzle.

Is this a case of “walking while black”: A harmless youth harassed, and then murdered, because of the symbolism of his hoodie and the pigment of his skin. Or was this an instance in which a wild youth threatened the tranquil order of a multi-racial community. These two are surrounded by others who attempted to use the incident for their own purposes. The filmmaker Spike Lee felt it his responsibility to tweet the (wrong) address for George Zimmerman, leading an elderly couple to fear for their lives. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson each hoped to boost their own sagging street cred. Ann Coulter for her part likened those who wanted justice for young Martin to the KKK. Gun rights advocates have weighed in, endorsing Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, permitting the use of deadly force.

These incidents misdirect us away from the deliberate consideration of our real racial divides. As we tell them, these are stories that are too good to be false. We trap ourselves when treating racial imaginaries as definitive accounts. As a parent myself, I recognize the anguish of Trayvon’s parents. Further, as a student of racial rumors (in my book with Patricia Turner, Whispers on the Color Line) I realize how difficult it is to avoid the desire to draw conclusions based on hunches. However, the debate over the linked fate of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin reveals our racial tensions at their most troubling. We would rather have our fantasy Martin and Zimmerman without waiting for the complex world to unspool. Perhaps the events of February 26 hold a mirror up to American race relations, but more surely the discussions since that Sunday do so. It is not the acts of Martin and Zimmerman that we need most to worry about, but the claims of those who struggle to fit these two into Procrustean boxes of their own design.