[img]583|left|Eric L. Wattree||no_popup[/img]White conservatives often criticize black people for being too quick to play what they call the race card. On the other hand, many black people criticize America for not being sensitive enough to the reality that race plays in American life. George Zimmerman’s trial for the murder of Trayvon Martin clearly validates the black community’s point of view.
Trayvon Martin is dead for no other reason than that he was born black in America. That is non-debatable. Had he been a white kid, Trayvon still would have been alive. Even as the jury is out deliberating Zimmerman’s fate, there is a raging debate going on in America over whether or not Zimmerman was justified in taking this mere child’s life.
Regardless of the eventual verdict, the trial clearly demonstrates how the laws of the land routinely are bent against the interests of the black community, while still managing to maintain the illusion of justice for all.
[img]2002|right|Trayvon Martin||no_popup[/img]The bottom line is, Trayvon Martin was guilty of absolutely nothing. He was engaged in an activity that millions of kids – good kids – engage in all across this country on a daily basis. He was not casing the neighborhood in preparation to commit a crime. He was not walking down the street smoking dope, nor was he walking the street in search of a potential victim.
He was an innocent kid on his way home after going to the store to buy a bag of Skittles and a soft drink. How, in a just society, can he end up dead, and his killer, an armed adult who stalked him and outweighed him by forty pounds, claim self-defense? The scenario strains credulity to the limit.
One would think the facts above would be clear to every American. They would if the situation was exactly reversed. If Trayvon Martin had been the adult in this scenario, stalked and killed a white kid under the exact same circumstances – outweighed his victim by forty pounds and was armed while the kid was not – chances are, he already would be on death row for first degree murder, assuming he survived to reach the police station.
While I don’t take the position that all white people are malevolent. Nor am I one who looks under every rock for the existence of racism whenever black people don’t get their way. I stand firm in the belief that racism is such an historically pervasive part of American life that many blacks and whites harbor grossly racist attitudes towards black people that are so deeply ingrained they don’t even recognize it themselves.
You don’t think so? Watch any hip-hop video. Count the number beautiful dark-skinned sisters you find. I guarantee you will find few. Even when a dark-skinned sister is so strikingly beautiful they can’t avoid using her, they usually will shine a light on her to make her look orange.
I reiterate, Trayvon Martin is dead due to the gross racism of a grossly racist society.
Eric L. Wattree is a writer, poet and musician, born in Los Angeles. A columnist for the Los Angeles Sentinel, the Black Star News, a staff writer for Veterans Today, he is a contributing writer to Your Black World, the Huffington Post, ePluribus Media and other online sites and publications. He also is the author of “A Message From the Hood.” Mr. Wattree may be contacted at Ewattree@Gmail.com http://www.whohub.com/wattree or Http://wattree.blogspot.com or Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)
