Walking While Black

When these sensational stories come out, such as the shooting of Trayvon Martin, I try hard not to jump to conclusions.  I've seen too many stories change completely once more details come out.  Here in the Boston area, of course, many of us will never forget the Charles Stuart case, in which a Black man reportedly shot a White couple driving through Boston after a birthing class.  The wife was killed, the husband survived, and the police quickly identified a possible shooter.... who turned out to be innocent since the husband actually planned the whole thing as a plot to kill his wife.

A few years ago we had the Duke lacrosse team story, in which the team allegedly raped a stripper they had hired.  Turned out she invented the whole thing, but that wasn't discovered until a lot of Duke guys were terribly slandered.

So I didn't hurry to a conclusion in the Trayvon Martin case.  But now it's been a month, and every detail seems to confirm that George Zimmerman is a murderer.  The "Stand Your Ground" law doesn't seem like much of a defense considering that Zimmerman chased the kid, who was unarmed and doing nothing more than carrying a bag of skittles through the neighborhood.

But I was at a social work conference today listening to the words of Nancy Boyd-Franklin, an African American social worker and mother.  She told of a time when she brought her 12 year old son and some friends to a New Jersey mall, and before leaving them off had an important talk about what to do if the police stopped them in the mall (put your hands up and tell them you don't have a weapon).

Just another reminder to me about how far we still have to go in the US.  It would never occur to me to tell my White children what to do when the police come... let alone a crazy loser with a gun and a vigilante complex.