Warren and Buttigieg pander to black voters in Martin case, but who is really being "racist" here?

The cynicism of Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg “commemorating” the “racist murder” of Trayvon Martin is obvious; they just want to pander to a black audience for votes.  My own view is that the demonizing and dehumanizing treatment of George Zimmerman more qualifies as racist, which seems to be the only explanation for an easy knee-jerk reaction since Zimmerman is obviously Hispanic, and between white and black prejudice there is a hard place indeed. As I pointed out again and again, Martin was no “innocent child,” and neither of his parents stopped to consider the problems that might arise from sending a three-time suspended high school student—who was becoming more and more committed to criminal activities that should have landed him at least in a juvenile detention center, if not prison for his own good—to a community that was being rocked by crime and home invasions by “mostly young black transients” (according to a report by Reuters), which Martin certainly qualified as being. 

Again, the real racists ignore the evidence of Zimmerman’s 9-11 call to police in which he was claiming that Martin appeared to be spying inside homes that appeared to be unoccupied, and as a Miami Herald story pointed out, this could well likely be true, since one of his suspensions came after the discovery of “found” jewelry on his person that was reported stolen that very day from a nearby residence. The audio also indicated that Martin was approaching Zimmerman’s vehicle, and as he came up to it, started running, at which point the vehicle door is heard to be opening, with Zimmerman apparently giving chase. Zimmerman claimed that Martin ambushed him from a hiding place; one witness claims to have heard two males yelling outside. Another witness heard someone calling for help, and observed on the sidewalk outside his front door a male wearing the clothing that Martin was wearing on top of another male; upon first listen to the audio from another 9-11 call in which someone could be heard calling for help, Martin’s father stated that it was not the voice of his son, but then later changed his opinion, no doubt due to public pressure.

Whether or not you consider Martin’s “witness”—Rachel Jeantel—a liar or not, we will take her at her word that “crazy-ass cracker” is not a racist term for whites, but refers to “cops” or “cop wannabes,” which of course would only confirm that it was entirely reasonable for someone who had never seen him in the neighborhood—and especially well after dark—would be justified in believing the act of running after what had been observed had possibly criminal motivation.  It is interesting to note that Jeantel also made the alternative claim that Martin feared that Zimmerman was going to "rape" him--a clearly homophobic reference that Buttigieg seems to have missed, which isn't surprising given the lack of attention to detail in evidence. The claim that Martin was “unarmed” also holds no water; in the case of Luis Ramirez in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, he was killed by “unarmed” teenagers who repeatedly kicked him in the head. Brian Keith Brown caused the brain injury death of a 60-year old man in Seattle with one punch of his fist; in the Martin case, it was banging Zimmerman’s head against a concrete sidewalk. Police photos did show evidence of such an assault in both Zimmerman’s face and the back of his head. 

Could this incident have been played out differently? Certainly, but what is also the truth is that Martin’s mother sent him to him Samford because she couldn’t control his criminal behavior, and there is no reason to believe that he would have behaved any differently in a new environment—especially one in which he could find many other “young black transients” like himself to go on “house-hunting” activities that was sooner or later going to have consequences even if he and Zimmerman never had met.

But enough of this. There have been far more egregious cases that had little or no media attention, like that of Daniel Adkins, a developmentally-disabled Hispanic man in Arizona out walking his dog, shot by a black male who always carried a gun on his lap while driving around and claimed a "stand your ground" defense, or an unnamed Alabama woman who shot and killed Demetrius Antuan Thompson, a man who had no criminal record and there was no apparent reason for the shooting save the woman did not know him, and “feared” he might rob her; Alabama’s “stand your ground” law is much more open to “interpretation” than even Florida’s.

Leaders in the Hispanic community have been fearful to confront the racist aspect of the demonization and dehumanization of Zimmerman that can only be explained by a knee-jerk reaction to his “ethnicity”; they don’t want to be on the “wrong” side, except that it isn’t exactly clear what side is the “right” side. Nobody is demonizing the Las Vegas shooter, 20 percent of his victims being Hispanic, or the Orlando shooter, almost all of his victims Hispanic. Nobody accused the black men who carried out the Hamilton Avenue massacre in Indianapolis in 2006 as being “racist,” yet they clearly were motivated by the fact that the three children who they shot execution-style were just a bunch of Hispanics they just “disliked” because they were so. And nobody is really demonizing the El Paso shooter, for that matter.