I agree with the bold part. After that, not so much. Haven't you ever heard that the people you choose to surround yourself with shows a lot about your character? There are a lot of kids who go through school without getting themselves in trouble. If this was the kind of kid who had been shot, the case would be much different.
Different how? Different if he had been White with red hair and freckles and his name was Opie Taylor or Richie Cunningham? Does that make it different?
It's not only choirboys and high school cheerleaders who get shot and killed. Sometimes its typical kids who say and do typical kids things like curse, talk shit, act a little goofy and irresponsible and leave a cyber-fingerprint so every little amateur sleuth can pour over and try to predict the future.
Trayvon was a typical teenager, but "typical" means different things in different parts of America. What is considered a typical teenager in Chicago or Los Angeles may not be the same for Ames, Iowa. In some parts of America, Trayvon might look strange, even threatening, where in other neighborhoods you can look out your window and see a
thousand Trayvons walking by and never bat an eyelash.
Trayvon Martin liked girls, hated high school and was planning for college.
He loved rap music and enjoyed cracking jokes on Twitter about street culture.
The 17-year-old high school junior known as “Slimm” tweeted thousands of times over a period of months. His last 140-character message came just two days before he was gunned down in a gated townhouse community in Sanford.
But in the racially divisive media hype that has followed the teenager’s controversial killing, pages of nonsensical Twitter updates written back when Trayvon’s biggest concerns were getting a call back from a girl are now being examined and scrutinized by bloggers around the nation.
Critics call attention to his tattoos, an empty marijuana bag found in his school book bag, and a photo that purports to show him with gold teeth — “grills,” in hip-hop parlance — to show that he had a violent nature and that his family deliberately tried to keep this image from the public. His email accounts were hacked by white supremacists and his tweets were exposed by the conservative website The Daily Caller.
But friends say Trayvon wasn’t into violence.
“When I heard about the tragedy and the initial story, I knew it wasn’t true,” said Ricaysha Milton, 17, who knew Trayvon from Carol City High School, and corresponded with him over Twitter. “Trayvon is the ‘walk away’ type of guy. He’d rather walk away than fight.’’
Even if Trayvon Martin had gang tats and gold fronts (he 'didn't) and wore his pants hanging off his skinny butt, because that offends or confuses or intimidates or frightens some people, it doesn't make him a less sympathetic, or legitimate victim.
At least it doesn't for me. You may have a different opinion.
JWGriebel said:
I went to the length of looking up a link, then posting said link. The link had nothing to do with his color. It took excerpts from his life and painted them, just as has been done with Zimmerman. I don't believe I ever pitted race against race in this issue.
Maybe you're too close to your own situation to realize you have done
exactly that and I'm not the only one who's questioned your motivations on that score.
Writers often aren't fully cognizant of the weight of their words because they are busy creating them. Once they are set free and wander off into the world, those words are not always received as we might have hoped they would.
JWGriebel said:
Actually, they have a lot to do with the issue at hand. They get closer to showing his mentality, which could have meant proving if he was the sort of kid who would attack first, or would need provocation and thus be defending himself. If you consider basic background information and its use slime, well, I don't know what to say to that. As I've stated numerous times before, and you have ignored numerous times, just as Zimmerman knew nothing about Martin, Martin knew nothing about Zimmerman. Martin would not have known Zimmerman had a gun anymore than Zimmerman would have known Martin was on suspension for whatever reason. Thus, the case goes deeper than the surface. If they had known one another beforehand, it would be very, very easy to call. Since they didn't, it's not.
I can understand your desire to want George Zimmerman to be treated fairly and not be demonized by the media or Trayvon's supporters. However, you have pointedly ignored Zimmerman's previous criminal acts while suggesting his victim who had no criminal record, might have been have had an inclination toward violence that led him to confront and attack Zimmerman thereby giving him a reason to fire on the unarmed teen to save his own life.
Your expressed desire for even-handed treatment of George Zimmerman does not extend to Trayvon Martin. You have seized upon the thinnest of threads and attempted to tie a noose around him as a potential threat. Those that knew him do not seem to
acknowledge that Trayvon ever existed. They describe a boy that wasn't
confrontational or violent.
Zimmerman has his defenders who say he doesn't have a racist bone in his body. Why are they more credible than Trayvon's defenders?
JWGriebel said:
I've noticed your "go-to" thing, about halfway through each argument, is to pit black against white, even though Zimmerman his Hispanic and Jewish. Thus, I won't dignify this with a response. And of course, you will claim that wasn't your purpose and that I'm a racist somehow, but :shrug:
I don't believe I've call you any sort of racist. I just said you seemed to be linking to some sketchy websites with some pretty shitty content. I haven't been the only one to come to that conclusion either.
It isn't that I see everything through the prism of racism. I enjoy sunrises, kittens and a well-turned leg as much as the next guy and race doesn't have to do a thing with it. I never say,
"Awww...what a cute kitty. But you'd be cuter if you were a black kitten instead of a white one."
It doesn't embarrass me to point out racism where racism is present. I don't need the media or the president and certainly not you or anyone here to confirm and co-sign it. I go by what I know and whether if it is popular or even accepted by others never enters the equation. I'm faithful to my own truth.
I know both American history and the American mind and a lot of Americans would dearly love to forget their history. They would like to forget about the Middle Passage, slave auctions, plantations, Dred Scott, Jim Crow, sundown towns, segregation, the Imperial Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council, the Port Chicago mutiny, Rosewood, lynching, Emmett Till, Little Rock, "Bombingham and four little church girls," Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King assassinated, Jackson State, COINTELPRO, Patrick Dorsimond, Eleanor Bumphers, Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, Rodney King, James Byrd III, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant and now Trayvon Martin.
It's not so much that I always see racism as much as I'm finely attuned to racism.
Maybe I am hyper-sensitive to racism, but if I am, it's not as though I don't have reasons to be. It can be dangerous to be Black and oblivious to how racism still exists.
Or maybe you're just hyper-numb to racism. It's so far off your radar it's doesn't even raise a blip.
Then again, I don't know you and you certainly don't know me either. Not anymore than George Zimmerman knew Trayvon Martin. That didn't deter him from gunning him down though.
JWGriebel said:
That kind of argument wouldn't hold up in the court of law, so "you're a monster for looking into this case" doesn't decide my mind for me.
This is not a court of law and you're associating me with things I have never said and never accused you of. I have no interest in trying to decide your mind one way or the other any more than I need to defend or explain something I never said.