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.

On September 21, 2011, two American men, both in their early 40s, were put to death by order of their state government. One death provoked much discussion; the second was widely ignored. However, it is that second death that matters should we as a nation – or as a collection of states – decide to eliminate the death penalty for good and for all.

Outside of Georgia’s Jackson Prison, opponents of the death penalty gathered to hope, pray, and pay witness to the long death of Troy Davis. Mr. Davis was convicted of killing a police officer, Mark McPhail, in 1989. Whoever the killer was did a dastardly deed. And Mr. Davis was, according to the courts, that man. Over the years there came to be real doubts as to whether he was, in fact, guilty. The case depended largely on eyewitness testimony, and since the trial most of those eyewitnesses changed their stories. Perhaps Mr. Davis was not guilty of this crime.

No one, whatever stance they take on the legality of the death penalty, wishes for the state to kill innocent men, letting the real killer go free. Still, Mr. Davis had twenty years of appeals, and he never found a judge or parole board that was persuaded of his innocence. Shortly before his death, the Supreme Court, without dissent, refused to stay his execution. And it was done. Perhaps we must establish a more robust level of proof and be more modest in our certainty. Without doubt Mr. Davis came to be an impressive advocate for his own innocence. He wanted to live. However, shortly after 11:00 on the night of September 21^st, he was put to death by lethal injection. CNN’s Anderson Cooper covered the death watch with inspiring intensity, raising issues of Mr. Davis innocence and also the justice of the death penalty.

Eight-hundred miles west of Jackson, in Huntsville, Texas, another death occurred, quietly and without network klieg lights. Whereas Mr. Davis’s death came with complications over his possible innocence, for most observers the Texas death lacked much in the way of factual doubts. That same Wednesday evening, the state of Texas, also using a lethal injection, put to death Lawrence Russell Brewer. If the death penalty is to be eliminated, the American people must determine that the lives of people like Lawrence Brewer – no, not people like Mr. Brewer, but he himself – must be spared.

Perhaps Mr. Brewer had his fifteen minutes of fame at the time of the murder for which he – as one of three – were convicted, but those minutes had long passed. Lawrence Brewer was found guilty of involvement in the ghastly murder of James Byrd. Back on June 7, 1998, Mr. Byrd, walking along a local road in East Texas, was grabbed, beaten, chained, and then dragged for two miles behind a pickup. In the process he was beheaded. Brewer remains an unrepentant white supremacist and admits some involvement in the events of the night, but he denies being the killer, although he also claims that he would do it again. However, his involvement is certain and his politics – if such is the proper term – is dark and fraught. There was no vigil for Mr. Brewer. He died unmourned. He was no figurehead of unjust justice. Yet, if the death penalty is to be abolished, it is not only the articulate Davises that will live their full years, but the angry Brewers.

In stark contrast to Troy Davis, Lawrence Brewer, in spite of his claims of innocence for the murder, supports the death penalty. The question is, should we? It is hard to deny that over the decades, the death penalty has put some innocent men to death. While we now have instituted an elaborate system of checks as to legal procedure, we often don’t include the possibility of exculpating facts. And that is wrong. Further, many murders are fairly routine, as was that of the police officer whom Davis was accused of killing: they dismay, but do not outrage.

But there are some acts, and the death of James Byrd is a case in point, that call for a collective performance of disgust. The death penalty is not about the killer, but about the society that firmly announces that this must not stand. In our resolve we must not act “as animals,” lusting for blood or applauding the killing, but as a community that announces that some do not to remain in our midst. These deaths stand as a recognition of the possibility of evil.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton said of abortion, “It should not only be safe and legal, it should be rare.” I apply his model to state-sponsored death. The death penalty should be humane, it should be possible, and, most of all, it should be rare. The dramatic differences in the justice of the deaths of Troy Davis and Lawrence Brewer underline that only in extraordinary cases, horrific and unambiguous, death is not a blow at humanity, but a basis of that very humanity.