Trayvon Martin: The meaning of a teen’s tragic death

People tell me “racism no longer exists in America,” said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. But without racism, how do you explain the death of Trayvon Martin? As the world now knows, Martin, 17, was walking back to a condo owned by his father’s girlfriend in a suburb of Orlando last month when he was spotted by George Zimmerman, 28, a self-appointed “neighborhood-watch captain” who carried a handgun. Zimmerman decided Martin looked “suspicious,” and after a physical altercation in which someone could be heard screaming, “Help!,” Zimmerman shot and killed Martin, who was armed only with a bag of Skittles candy and a can of iced tea. Zimmerman, who is half Hispanic, denies any racial motive, said William Finnegan in NewYorker.com, but he’d called cops 46 times in 14 months to report “suspicious” persons, often noting that they were black. On his call to 911 while pursuing Martin, he mutters what sounds a lot like “f---ing coons,” or perhaps “goons.” Once again, our society has been given heartbreaking proof “of the ongoing peril of being young, black, and male in this country.”

We don’t know yet why Zimmerman pulled the trigger, said Rick Moran in AmericanThinker.com, so turning it into a racial crime is irresponsible. Zimmerman’s story is that Martin pounced on him, saying, “You got a problem?” and punched him in the face. He says he fired his gun while Martin had him down on the ground—and cops say witnesses corroborated that account, which is why they didn’t charge Zimmerman, whose right to shoot was protected by Florida’s “stand your ground” law. Nonetheless, the “race baiters” like President Obama have jumped to self-serving conclusions. Obama told the nation to do some “soul searching” in the wake of Martin’s death, adding that “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” When Obama made those comments last week, said Victor Davis Hanson in NationalReview.com, the only available photos of Martin showed a cherubic preteen with a gentle smile. Since then a different picture has emerged—that of a 6-foot-2 youth with gold teeth and tattoos, once suspended from school for marijuana possession, whose Twitter handle was “@NO_LIMIT_NIGGA.” So who was the aggressor that night? We simply don’t know.

The right-wing smear campaign against Trayvon is disgusting, said Michelle Goldberg in TheDailyBeast.com. Why are they suggesting that he invited his killing by wearing a hoodie, or calling himself a “nigga” to his buddies? Conservatives have become “deeply invested in the idea that anti-black racism is no longer much of a problem in the United States.” Hence, their need to paint Martin as a thug—just like rape victims are portrayed as sluts who wear too-short skirts.

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The killing of young black men is indeed a national tragedy, said Heather Mac Donald in NationalReview.com, but “lethal white racism” is not the primary cause. A black male of Trayvon’s age is seven times more likely to die of homicide than a white or Hispanic male, and in 92 percent of these crimes, the killer is another black person. If civil-rights leaders really want to save black men’s lives, said Juan Williams in The Wall Street Journal, they ought to turn their attention to what’s destroying them: the broken African-American family, the 50 percent high school dropout rate for black males, and the “daily carnage of black-on-black crime.” Let us mourn Trayvon Martin, “but where are the protests regarding the larger problems facing black America?”