Heavy Hearted Question

Tonight I am writing with a heavy heart. I don't want my blog to be the birthplace of controversy or to stir up negative emotions but I can't get this out of my head (nor will the media let me).

Picture this:
A guy, in a navy blue hoodie his Grandma bought him for his birthday two weeks ago, walks to a convenient store to get some Starbursts for his little sister...she had been bugging him all week about those stupid Starbursts. After he pays, he thanks the cashier and walks home. He even holds the door open for another customer as she enters. As he's heading home, it's a little chilly, so he puts on his hood. After a little bit, he hears a car creeping behind him. Sure he's just hallucinating or paranoid, he keeps walking...but then he continues to hear it. He clears his blond locks out of his sight and looks over his shoulder only to see a car stopped with its lights on. As strange as it is, it's a sleepy town so he doesn't think much of it and keeps walking. He's the captain of the soccer team for goodness sakes, he can handle this, but he still has a funny feeling about the car so he calls his girlfriend and says, "hey, I think someone is following me." She tells him to run. So he begins to sprint and the car speeds up. He looks over his shoulder again, hair flopping in his face, to see a man getting out of his car, charging him. He turns around to face the man, because he can't run forever and the man starts to punch him. They exchange blows until the man pulls out his gun and the final blow is given. The captain of the soccer team is dead.

You probably knew what I was alluding to once you reached the part about Starbursts...
 Trayvon Martin.

Now, before I ruffle any feathers, I have to say... I am against ANY violence; to animals to adults to children to trees; in riots, in justifiable homicide, in war and in "stand your ground" cases. Murder is murder and killing is killing; even if it is within the law to do so. Anyone who kills should go to jail, in my opinion. But that's not what I'm writing about tonight.

In this scenario, I depicted the Starburst wielding boy as a white kid. If I had a dime for every time I heard someone say, "this wasn't about race" when talking about the Trayvon Martin case, I would be a wealthy, wealthy lady. It is about race; it's always about race. Our country has race deeply ingrained into everything it thinks, says or does. Humor me for a second...

I will never know what it feels like to have a woman clutch her purse and move away from me when I stand next to her on the bus. I will never know what it feels like to hear car doors lock as I pass by on the sidewalk. I will never know what it feels like to be followed in a store by a clerk. I will never know what it feels like to have someone cross the street when they see me up ahead. These are realities for black men. I had a friend in Bridgeport who told me very casually as if it was nothing, that these above listed things happened to him daily and had been happening to him since he was 10. SINCE HE WAS 10! Race is always there and it was there the night Trayvon was killed. This is about race.

Tell me, did you feel sorry for the captain of soccer team that I just depicted? It's OK if you did, heck, I did. I anticipate that if it was a white kid instead of a black kid who was killed, this is the kind of story we would've gotten from the media. Not one depicting him as a "thug" or "fighter" or splitting hairs over whether he was a "boy" or a "man". It would've been a different story and it would've had a different outcome. Dare I say, I even believe this above mentioned story would've remained fiction because Zimmerman wouldn't have followed a white boy home in the first place?

Now, I;m left with a heavy heart because I hate violence, a family lost their son and because racism is still alive today, deep down (we all scurry to lock our car doors from time to time). But also because I am white. I have dated black men, taught black children, comforted and found housing for black adults and laughed and danced with black senior citizens but I am still white. No matter how hard I want to push away or ignore the underlying race divide, it's there. Our country was founded on racial divides and our justice system is insanely broken. For example, "people of color make up about 30 percent of the United States’ population, they account for 60 percent of those imprisoned" and "one in three black men will go to prison in their lifetime" (http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2012/03/13/11351/the-top-10-most-startling-facts-about-people-of-color-and-criminal-justice-in-the-united-states/).  These are facts. It's about race.

So I'm left asking myself, in this tragedy and the many that are happening even as I type, what can I do?

(What sparked this post was this article about Barack Obama, take a read if you have a moment: http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/07/19/19563211-obama-trayvon-martin-could-have-been-me-35-years-ago?lite . Per usual, he says it better than I.)