Excellent commentary, Charles. There's no excuse for the bigotry and racism that runs rampant nowadays, and I don't just mean in this comments section. As a petite white woman, however, I feel it's fair to point out the disgusting behavior of the lowlifes and thugs who loiter around 3rd and Pine. I mean, I know it's a lot to ask not to be hassled or threatened while I wait for the bus (it's happened more than once), but many black men do reinforce the negative stereotype.

@ 107
I think it's fair to point out that all Black men suffer from this assertion that these men are perpetuating a stereotype, rather than just acknowledging that some (men) are asshats!

One aspect of white privilege is the tendency to see Black people in terms of stereotype, and to discount them on this basis with no threat to your financial or societal security.

I don't have the luxury of writing off all White people even though a significant number of White people have been hurtful or threatening to me (example: I was 1 of 4 Black people in my semi-rural high school of 500 students) at various points in my life.

I've even had close friends ask me "things about Black people", as if I am the arbiter of all things Black, negative and positive. One of my punk rock friends once asked, with no sense of irony at all, "Why do Black people always put stuff in their hair?" I just looked at her ... with her bleached blond, gelled and hair sprayed mohawk standing tall and motionless in the wind.
Meanwhile my head was shaved and product-free.

God, I do wish we were past this! Even well meaning people like you fall into the trap of thinking that Black people can just help themselves by doing (fill in the blank here). #100 touches on it very well, but there's no way to dissect all of the myriad of ways in which our societal systems are unequal and, in fact, damaging to Black people.

White people need to educate themselves about race. Just as the LGBTQ community needs straight allies to be afforded the legal right to marry (among other basic civil rights they should just *have*), Black people need White people to be educated and comfortable talking about race in America.
Read about the GI Bill, and how it benefited only White soldiers.
Redlining – what it was and how it affected Black home ownership and defined neighborhoods, setting up unequal tax bases and infrastructure inequalities.
Employment discrimination.
Incarceration rates for Blacks vs. Whites/arrests and convictions for Blacks vs. Whites for the same or similar crimes.

This thing about America is really heartbreaking.

@Mudede, I know you're right, everyone who says you're not simply does not understand institutional racism. There are too many people that have bought into the "your choice" mindset of America, which is a delusion perpetuated by the most powerful in order to justify everyone's place in society so no one challenges them.

More black than white people are impoverished as a leftover result of segregation and discrimination. Contrary to what a lot of people think, it is not because black people are just motivation-deficient or less capable. They have systematically been told what they should do and where they belong. Poverty breeds crime, because when people are scrambling for their very survival and stability, they will commit crimes because they are lucrative and to gain leverage in an unsafe environment. Some people treat this as an excuse to be racist, or worse, to shoot a black teen for no reason.

It's real easy to explain away your privilege with a mindset that believes individuals alone are responsible for their destinies. In order for that to be true, we would have to be completely disconnected from one another and fully embrace whatever advantages we had over others simply to climb higher in the made up world we have of wealth and status. That is not the world we do (or should) live in.

I doubt anyone is reading this far, I've written too much to hold people's attention and we're already 110 comments in. But racism is built in, just like sexism and classism; if you deny this, you are truly in denial, and you have been sufficiently indoctrinated into a way of life that serves the interests only of those who have indoctrinated you.

And you know, it's not so much the verdict that is disheartening, it is the vitriolic spewing of Zimmerman supporters and deniers of racism that makes me so disappointed in our society.

Our egos can really make us blind.

The other thing is that some people in this country seem to take ANY mention of an injustice or of suffering as a shakedown or a scam...they can't acknowledge that there can be REAL pain and wrong done to powerless people here.

Or, worst of all, they assume that, somehow, justice and empathy are "zero-sum"...that if something, anything at all, is done to make life a little less miserable for someone else, it will HAVE to mean that they, the somewhat more comfortable, the anti-emphatic, will lose ground somehow, will suffer for it in some way. They refuse to accept that ending injustice for any group within this country is good for all of us, that we're ALL better off in a society where nobody suffers.

This is why some of my fellow white folks, for example, obsess about affirmative action and the claim that it put them out of jobs. The truth is, almost ALL large-scale white job loss since 1975 or so has been due to outsourcing and other acts of corporate greed, but rather than "fight(ing)the REAL enemy" as Sinead O'Connor would put it(which means joining those who stand up to corporate greed and making it more likely that the forces of greed will at least be forced to back down slightly on their campaign to bleed the rest of us dry), they rant about blacks supposedly getting jobs due to
"quotas". You'd think that they would realize that, in most cases, business and corporations who didn't hire particular white workers just TELL them that it was due to "affirmative action" in order to get them to hate blacks rather than the businesses and corporations themselves-but this still hasn't got through to a lot of my fellow white folks, for some reason(probably due to the fact that too many of us still buy into the "anybody can make it if they just try hard enough" myth-a myth the last thirty-three years of neoliberalism should have discredited for all).

The enemy of white workers has never been blacks..it's the rich. Please folks, before it's too late, just ACCEPT THIS already-and accept that our only collective chance for economic and social survival is to join forces with everybody who works and everybody who WOULD work if the system would let them. Those are your friends-not Rush, Glenn, the Kochs or their paid flash mob in the tricorn hats.

I would just briefly like to point out that racism in america has been around long enough that it has worked its way into the collective social consciousness; meaning racism in america, unlike in many African countries, is no longer always deliberate. So Zimmerman, or any other person for that matter, can be all sorts of black but the overwhelming evidence of experience suggests he still would have shot that kid, not because of a conscious thought "I hate black people" but because of the subconscious propensity of many Americans (I hesitate to say most as we cannot test all Americans) towards a fear of black men. I won't lie, after close examination of my own behavior,I am more likely to cross the street if I see a black man in a hoodie coming towards me than a white man.
It should interest you to know that I'm black,I agree with scientists when they say our skin color is a result of UV radiation, and I think people are like skittles....the more colors they come in the better
Lets not be under any illusions about the America we live in and with.

Dear Charles --

I read this piece in the printed paper, and I knew before I even came here to look at the comments that haters would come out.

White people (and I'm one of them) often freak out at any mention of racism, and react disproportionately. But please, keep telling the truth. We need to know this.

here we go with oppress black people again... you monkeys need to get off this racist drama.. its getting way to old...

Well, guys like you could STOP oppressing black people. Just a thought.

And saying that it's "old" to talk about racism while referring to black people as "monkeys" in the same sentence doesn't really help whatever point you thought you were making.