Revisit Candorville’s Trayvon Martin cartoons, and read this article by Leonard Pitts, of the Miami Herald:
With George Zimmerman out on bail last week after his latest run-in with police, it seems an opportune time to discuss the second killing of Trayvon Martin.
The first, of course, has been discussed ad infinitum since Zimmerman shot the unarmed 17-year-old to death last year. But then Trayvon was killed again. The conservative noise machine engaged in a ritual execution of his character and worth, setting out with breathtaking indifference to facts and callous disregard for simple decency to murder the memory of a dead child.
Geraldo Rivera blamed him for his own death because he wore a hooded sweatshirt — in the rain, yet. Glenn Beck’s website suggested he might have been an arsonist, kidnapper or killer. Rush Limbaugh made jokes about “Trayvon Martin Luther King.”
Some conservative readers even chastised me for referring to him as a “child” or a “boy” though at 17, he was legally both. Makes him seem too sympathetic, they said. One man assured me, absent any evidence or, apparently, any need of it, that contrary to reports, Trayvon was not walking to where he was staying that day but was in fact “casing” the neighborhood.
One woman forwarded a chain email depicting a tough-looking, light-skinned African-American man with tattoos on his face. It was headlined: “The Real Trayvon Martin,” which it wasn’t. It was actually a then-32-year-old rapper who calls himself The Game. But the message was clear: Trayvon was a scary black man who deserved what he got.
I sent that woman an image of Trayvon from the Zimmerman trial. It shows him lying open-eyed and dead on the grass. “ This is the real Trayvon,” I wrote.
It was a waste of time. “They’re both pictures of Trayvon,” she insisted. So deeply, bizarrely invested was she in the idea of Trayvon as thug that she could not distinguish between a fair-skinned man with tattoos, and a brown boy with no visible markings. Literally, they all look alike to her.
Read the rest of this article at the Miami Herald.
Yeah, I'm getting the same response from one of my more conservative Facebook friends whom I went to school with. That poor George is being set up by someone else who just wants her 15 minutes of fame.
In my opinion, the man needs help.
I know it’s not really the same thing (same sentiment but different levels of severity) but after reading the snippet you posted about the woman who stubbornly refused to believe that the real Trayvon wasn’t a 31 year old rapper I keep “flashing back” to an article I read several years ago about breed-bans & why implementing them isn’t quite as easy as so many folks like to think.
The article was written by a man who owned a Golden Retriever & (among other things) related the time that he was walking his dog one morning when a young couple coming the other way saw him & promptly scurried to the other side of the street. As the puzzled man passed by he heard the husband say to his wife “I know a Pit Bull when I see one!”
It’s truly sad how absolutely positive people can be when it comes to believing in their own ignorance.