The Color of Trayvon Martin’s Skin

If you follow the news, then you’re going to know what I’m writing about here. This post is going to be about the gunning down of a 17-year-old kid in Florida. His name is Trayvon Martin.

Forgive me if this is a bit rambling. I find myself depressed about this news story.

As most of you know, this child was killed by a want-to-be cop named George Zimmerman. Zimmerman was uneasy seeing a black kid walking in his neighborhood who had just bought some candy and an ice tea at a neighborhood store. It clearly looks like Zimmerman was following him and when Martin asked why he was being followed, Zimmerman, the want-to-be cop, got scared of a child and shot him to death.

Are any of you out there scared of 17-year-old kids? Are you less scared if they’re white? Are you more scared if they’re black? I’m just asking. I’m thinking about something that happened to me recently. It was just a simple exchange with another human being who happened to be black.

A few weeks before my cataract surgery, I was coming back from Walgreens on Madison Avenue in Covington. I was making it home alright, but I was struggling seeing the traffic light to cross the street. A teenager, a young black kid, could tell.

“You need some help crossing the street?” he asked. I felt like a little old lady, but I said “I wouldn’t mind it.”

After crossing the street, he asked if I would be OK. I said yes and thanked him. I was grateful for his help. He wasn’t out to rob me or hurt me and he didn’t care about the color of my white skin. This black kid simply was being a nice person.

What’s my point? We all need to be more tolerate of another person’s skin. We’ve been saying this to each other for decades, but yet sometimes I feel like racial relationships are exactly the same as they were decades ago. Tense.

What Zimmerman was doing was racial profiling—no doubt in my mind. He was a gun carrying white idiot protecting himself from a kid with candy.

Sorry—don’t mean to be all negative here, but this kind of story, this kind of shit that has recently happened in Florida could easily happen anywhere and it makes me plain sick. When are we all going to more forward and look past a person’s skin?

(Photo from Associated Press)