Morgan's Corner: Where do we go from here?

If nothing else comes out of the supercharged events surrounding the verdict finding George Zimmerman not guilty in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin it's issues of race churning around it.

Barak Obama notwithstanding, the death of Martin and the Zimmerman trial, and now the verdict, have served to disabuse us of any notions of a post-racial society.

However, the trial and the verdict just might present an opportunity for a painful but badly needed discussion on racism in our society, which has refused to engage the topic.

Right now the country is polarized between those who think Zimmerman literally got away with murder and others just as convinced that Zimmerman shot the unarmed teenager with his handgun in self-defense.

The dissenters of the verdict claim that Zimmerman profiled Martin, stalked, then killed him, simply because he was black and allegedly up to no good.

The consensus in the black community is Martin's death is the latest in a never-ending line of black men ending up dead at the hands of white guys and then, unless the crime and manner of that death is exceptionally vile and heinous, the killer is often found not guilty.

Nationally, there are few African-American males -- including this columnist -- who haven't been stopped, perhaps frisked and treated with considerable disrespect, even beaten and jailed by law enforcement officers. That doesn't mean that all cops are brutal or take every opportunity to heap disrespect on black men, but it is a recurring theme across the country. Perhaps the most recent events will reignite discussion of race relations in the nation.

And just as important, the Martin/Zimmerman case has spurred a discussion about why the prisons and jails, from sea to shining sea, are overpopulated with young black inmates, arrested mostly for possession of drugs, often small amounts of marijuana.

In her book "The New Jim Crow," Michelle Alexander contends that the war on drugs has devolved into the latest means of controlling men of color.

In his book, "Slavery by Another Name," author Douglas A. Blackman scrupulously explored the period, not long after slavery, when Southern whites hit on a way to essentially re-enslave black men and black women in a system of peonage by arresting them for slight, even ludicrous, charges, i.e. not being able to give a good account of themselves, loitering, etc, then, hauling them before a local magistrate who imposed a fine the prisoner could not possibly pay, sentencing the person to work, often doing hard labor at plantations or mines. Often these victims never achieved their freedom, were tortured, and sometimes worked literally to death.

The book is a hard read, but Blackman backs up his findings with solid, painstaking research.

It so happens that state legislatures across the country are taking a hard look at the penal systems that cost outsized sums of money to maintain. In New Jersey, it can cost $40,000 a year to incarcerate someone. That's roughly the annual tuition for a first-rate university.

In her book, Alexander faults the so-called war on drugs that's pushed thousands of black males to the margins of society, unable to access student loans or access public housing and every time they're faced with an employment application, it becomes a virtual impossibility they'll be hired once they've filled in the box that asks if they've ever been arrested.

Perhaps the Martin-Zimmerman tragedy will help open a dialogue that will lead to answers by recognizing the problems.