Some thoughts on Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.

[Blue_In_AK]

For anyone who thinks that there are no racial overtones to how this matter has been handled...

Imagine a white kid in a hoodie suddenly appearing alone in a mostly African-American neighborhood. An observant resident notices and wonders what the kid is doing here. Maybe he's come looking for drugs, certainly a possibility, so he decides to follow the kid and see what he's up to. The kid notices that he's being followed by a "menacing" black man, and feeling threatened, he pulls out the gun he's carried for protection in this neighborhood and shoots the man dead. Self-defense, right? Does anyone doubt that the boy would most likely be able to get off on a self-defense claim, especially in a state like Florida with their stand-your-ground law?

Suppose the black man had decided that he just didn't want these drug-addled white kids in his neighborhood, that they do nothing but cause trouble and encourage the drug dealers. He decides to take him out because these white kids "always get away with it," while the AA kids are going to prison. You know he would be charged with first-degree murder on the spot.


These scenarios may not be exactly comparable to what transpired with Trayvon, but it seems that in any confrontation between a black person and a white person, the black person is ALWAYS more suspect in the eyes of the law. It isn't right.

[rhett o rick]

1. Yeah, so what's your point.

I completely agree.

[MrScorpio]

2. Trust me, strange white kids in "bad" urban neighborhoods will never be molested...

At the level to which any young, black person would be molested in any "good" suburban area. The police will see to that.

Trust me, white kids wearing hoodies in the city are pretty much unremarkable, even in a predominately black town like Detroit.

Just part of the normal backdrop.

[Blue_In_AK]

4. You're certainly correct about the "unremarkable" hoodies.

In Alaska, wearing a hoodie is almost a sartorial requirement -- for EVERYONE -- especially in the summer when a jacket is too heavy and shirt sleeves aren't quite warm enough. And then in the winter, we wear them as part of our "layering." There's nothing better.

I just don't understand all this fear of the hoodie.

[yardwork]

3. The white kid in the black neighborhood is more likely to get hassled by the (white) police.

It's happened to me. Driving white in a black neighborhood, pulled over by white cops who were astounded to learn that I actually knew people in the neighborhood and had a reason to be there other than to buy drugs, which was what they thought.

The second time this happened to me the police officer had a particularly lame excuse - "you went through a red light when you made that left turn on a green back there." No duh. When you turn left on a green light you kind of have to go under the red light as you leave the intersection. After keeping me on the side of the road for 15 minutes while he was on the phone and his computer (clearly trying to find something, anything, to detain me) he mumbled something about "not sure about that red light thing and let me go with a stern warning to, um, something.

It was just a tiny taste of what it must be like to be black in the southern U.S.