Zimmerman initiated this incident, is that not a fact ?

Zimmerman stalked and killed an unarmed Martin.

and expect not to get charged with any type of criminal charge

if that was the case there would be many more dead people everywhere

zimmerman has a violent history but because his dad is a judge he has been getting that get out of jail free pass

white has its privilege



Trayvon Martin, White Denial and the Unacceptable Burden of Blackness in America
By now, you probably know the shameful details, but they are worth repeating, in any event.

On the evening of February 26, George Zimmerman, a self-appointed “neighborhood watch captain” in an Orlando suburb, shot and killed 17-year old Trayvon Martin.

Because Martin was black.

And no, don’t even think of rolling your eyes at the suggestion. That is what happened, just as surely as so many might well be loathe to admit it.

Oh sure, he denies such a motivation, as does his family, but the details of the incident, now emerging from that evening leave very little question about it.

This was not, as we too often hear in the wake of such incidents, “a tragedy.”

This was not, as some would have it, “a terrible accident.”

It was murder, plain and simple. And it would be called such by everyone in a nation that had any commitment to honest language, which, sadly, would pretty much rule out the one in which Martin’s life began and ended, and in which Zimmerman continues to operate as a free man, unarrested by the police.

Trayvon Martin is dead because George Zimmerman believed his neighborhood needed and deserved to be protected from young black men, who could not possibly belong there, in his estimation. Never mind that Martin was in the community with his father, visiting friends. Never mind that Martin was armed only with Skittles and iced tea, while Zimmerman carried a loaded weapon.

Zimmerman, who has a history of aggressive behavior (including assaulting an officer a few years ago), appears to have something of a Dirty Harry syndrome about him. He is someone described by his own neighbors as overzealous, motivated by an obsessive desire to guard the perimeter of his community and pose as a crime-fighting hero to those around him. It doesn’t take much imagination to size up Zimmerman psychologically. He’s like so many other utterly unaccomplished males who fantasize about being a badass law officer, meting out justice to the ne’er-do-wells. He’s the kind of person who, if he weren’t playing at policeman, would be one of those guys fabricating stories of his war heroism, buying fake military uniforms and medals on eBay and telling strangers in bars how he single-handedly held off insurgents in Kandahar or some such shit. He’s one of those guys. If you’ve met one, you’ve met them all: a wannabe somebody with a gun permit and a healthy dose of amped up, testosterone-fueled anxiety about outsiders; and so too, in his case, it appears (not only from this incident but also from dozens of previous 9-1-1 calls he’d made), a consistent fear about black men, whom he seemed to consider, almost by definition, as not belonging in his neighborhood.

If Trayvon Martin had been, say, Todd Martin, a 17-year old white male, in the same neighborhood on the same evening, it wouldn’t have mattered that he was wearing a hoodie, looking at homes as he passed them by, or fiddling with his waistband. These, it should be noted, were the apparent indicators of criminality that Zimmerman felt compelled to share with the police during his 9-1-1 call, before opting to chase Martin himself, in brazen defiance of their explicit instruction to stay put. Had he been white, Martin’s humanity would have been clearly discernible to Zimmerman. But he was black, and male, and that alone inspired Zimmerman to conclude that there was “something wrong with this guy,” and that he appeared to be “on drugs,” a judgment Zimmerman felt qualified to render based on his extensive background in behavioral psychology, bested only by his prodigious law enforcement training, and by extensive and prodigious, in this case, I mean none whatsoever.

Indeed, if you do not know that Martin’s race (and more to the point, Zimmerman’s racism) is central to the former’s death at the hands of the latter, it may well be that you are incapable of ever comprehending even the most obvious manifestations of this nation’s longstanding racial drama. Worse still, it may suggest that you are so bereft of empathy as to render you morally and emotionally dangerous to decent people.

And by empathy here, I don’t mean merely the ability to feel for the family of this murdered child. I’m guessing most all can manage that much. Rather, I refer to the kind of empathy too rarely attainable, by whites in particular, in the case of black folks who insist, based on their entire life experience and the insight gained from that experience, that their rights to life and liberty are too often subject to the capricious whims of those with less melanin than they, and for reasons owing explicitly to the color of their skin.

Empathy — real empathy, not the situational and utterly phony kind that most any of us can muster when social convention calls for it — requires that one be able to place oneself in the shoes of another, and to consider the world as they must consider it. It requires that we be able to suspend our own culturally-ingrained disbelief long enough to explore the possibility that perhaps the world doesn’t work as we would have it, but rather as others have long insisted it did.

Empathy, which is always among the first casualties of racist thinking, mandates our acceptance of the possibility that maybe it isn’t those long targeted by oppression who are exaggerating the problem or making the proverbial mountain out of a molehill, but rather we who have underestimated the gravity of racial domination and subordination in this country, and reduced what are, in fact, Everest-sized peaks to ankle-high summits, and for our own purposes, rather than in the service of truth.

-- Modified on 5/17/2012 3:33:44 AM

WITH THE LOADED CONCEALED GUN

-- Modified on 5/17/2012 1:27:41 AM

-- Modified on 5/17/2012 1:28:22 AM