Trayvon

These kids I just talked to genuinely think Trayvon got killed because he was wearing a hoodie.  ARE YOU KIDDING ME.  They say a white kid wearing a hoodie would have appeared just as suspect as a black kid.  They say if they saw anyone walking with their head down and a hoodie on, they would be suspicious.  I had no idea.  I own about 6 hoodies.  According to this guy, it was raining and 63 degrees that night in Sanford, FL.  George Zimmerman described it as "fucking cold."  Do you really think it's suspicious to put your hood on and walk quickly in cold rain?

My standard line on this whole thing is that comparing it to Emmett Till both makes no sense and makes a whole lot of sense.  There could be no question that Emmett Till's murder was motivated by pure racist hatred, whereas it would be quite a stretch to say the same about Trayvon's killing.  Emmett's death was also magnitudes more gruesome.  I think, though, that in addition to being essentially ignored (and therefore legitimized) by law enforcement, both murders encapsulate the racial attitudes and anxieties of their respective times.  The racist hatred that got Emmett killed was in a lot of ways representative of larger white America's hatred and devaluing of black people.  Things these days are a lot more subtle.  It's certainly not fashionable any longer to hate black people, and no one would suggest that black people are intellectually inferior to white people or somehow less human, but plenty of white (and apparently hispanic) people get nervous when they encounter a black man on the streets late at night, especially if he is wearing anything besides a suit.  This kind of fear of blackness surely has a lot of complicated causes (such as the perceived prevalence of crime and violence in black neighborhoods, a fact that fractures into a million more issues), but the lesson of Trayvon's case is that sometimes this fear can be deadly.  It should shake us awake.  And it should challenge us to face our fears and move past them.