Yesterday, six women in the state of Florida, five of them white, made clear that the inherent value of Black life and Black personhood is legally indefensible.

The legal sanctioning of George Zimmerman’s murder of Trayvon Martin gives veracity to an argument that Chief Justice Roger B. Taney made in 1857: A Black person has “no rights which a white man is bound to respect.”

No, George Zimmerman is not white. But his assumptions about Black men are rooted in the foundational assumptions of white supremacy and his treatment by the justice system have conferred upon him privileges usually reserved for white men. The malleability of white supremacy for non-Black bodies says something about the singular power and threat of the Black body in this kind of racialized system.

Though much of the mainstream media who have covered this case have convinced themselves that race did not play a role in this trial, a Black kid is dead because being young, Black, and male, and wearing a hoodie in the rain is apparently a crime punishable by death.

When I think of the jury in this case, five of them white women, I am convinced that at a strictly human level, this case came down to whether those white women could actually see Trayvon Martin as somebody’s child, or whether they saw him according to the dictates of Black male criminality.

(I’m fairly sure that Pauli Murray, the famed African-American civil rights attorney and feminist activist who successfully dismantled the all white, all-male jury system in the case of White v. Crook (1966), a decision which made an all female jury possible, is somewhere turning over in her grave.)

Now that we have a verdict, it is clear that they didn’t see a young man who could be their own child, because white women’s sons’ aren’t stalked, profiled, and deemed unworthy of being in middle class neighborhoods. But young Black male criminals are exactly the kind of people that plague the white imagination and spur white flight, gated communities, and heavy policing.

Some will say that I shouldn’t pick on the jurors. They were only working with the evidence they were given. I say there’s enough blame to go around. Certainly the prosecution didn’t do Trayvon any favors.

All these things considered, the verdict is frankly pretty predictable. So, too, then is Black rage.

Unabashed, unchecked white supremacy will always lead to unabashed, unchecked Black rage. Call it the laws of physics.