Simple as black and white, continued

For more than a week now, the airwaves, the Internet, and the print media have all been filled with facts, speculation, and opinion about the Trayvon Martin killing. Well-meaning people have been spending hours and using reams of paper and millions of bytes to debate the causes and effects of this shooting.

In America, we're taught to take pride in our justice system being blind. Carved into the facade of the Supreme Court building are the words, "Equal Justice Under Law." In America, no person is supposed to get special treatment, positive or negative, in the justice system.

For me, the core issue of this case comes down to one question: Can anyone claim, with a straight face, that the outcome to date of this episode would be the same if the races of the two people involved were reversed?

Imagine a black man, a self-appointed vigilante in a neighborhood not his own, carrying a handgun. With a pattern of calling 911 almost every day for the first two months of the year, this wanna-be law enforcer follows a young, white boy who is innocently walking from a local store back to his father's girlfriend's house. During yet another call to police, the 911 dispatcher specifically tells him not to follow the young male. The black man continues, regardless, and soon shoots the young, white boy, killing him in the street.

Imagine the local police duly arriving, surveying the situation, and not even questioning the black shooter. In fact, they let him go, still carrying the gun he used to kill a young, white boy. Also imagine local authorities taking away the body, doing virtually nothing to find his family and placing him in the morgue as a "John Doe." Not until days later do the boy's family find out where he is and what has happened to him. It takes weeks for any of this to become an issue.

Can you really imagine any of this happening if the shooter was black and the victim was white? I certainly can't. But this is all exactly what happened in the murder of African-American Trayvon Martin by Caucasian George Zimmerman.

It says a lot about our country that this case has once again highlighted the horror that is racial prejudice and violence; it will say a lot more about our country in 2012 how this case is handled going forward.