Colts Linebacker to Honor Trayvon Martin with Pair of Cleats

The trial of George Zimmerman following his shooting of Trayvon Martin was an anti-Rightwing story served up on a silver platter for the Fake News Industrial Complex (FNIC) and trust me when I say that they certainly made hay with this incident while they could.

This was such a terribly handled trial by the media as to even involve the president of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, who seemed to have a particular talent for inserting his premature opinion-making into any altercation that involved what he deemed was an incident that involved racism against a Black man.

In this case, President Obama came out to the bully pulpit to deliver a scathing message to White Americans after the verdict was reached of not guilty in the murder of Trayvon Martin.  George Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder.

You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.

There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me — at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.

And I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.

The African American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws — everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.

Now, this isn’t to say that the African American community is naïve about the fact that African American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system; that they’re disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence. It’s not to make excuses for that fact — although black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context. They understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.

And so the fact that sometimes that’s unacknowledged adds to the frustration. And the fact that a lot of African American boys are painted with a broad brush and the excuse is given, well, there are these statistics out there that show that African American boys are more violent — using that as an excuse to then see sons treated differently causes pain.

I think the African American community is also not naïve in understanding that, statistically, somebody like Trayvon Martin was statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else. So folks understand the challenges that exist for African American boys. But they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there’s no context for it and that context is being denied. And that all contributes I think to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.

So, as you can see, this wasn’t Trayvon Martin’s fault because he was an African-American man who was “statistically more likely to be shot” than a White male teen in the same situation.

Read more on the next page about the terrifying bias on the part of the press that literally endangered the life of this man who was acting in self-defense!

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