George Zimmerman suing parents of Trayvon Martin among others

[Rev. Rye]

If George Zimmerman says he identifies as Hispanic, and has a Peruvian mother, I don't really see a need to doubt that self-identification. It's not like this is some sort of Rachel Dolezal type of case. And it's very beside the point. He murdered a 17 year old young man. Who cares what race he is?

Well, of course, it should be noted that Hispanic/Latino is not listed as its own race on the US Census (due in no small part for how complicated the issue of race can be, especially in Latin America; just look at Cameron Diaz and Celia Cruz, both Latin, though one looked more black than brown, and the other could probably fit under Hitler's Aryan ideal, and then, looking at how Brazil approaches whiteness, it all gets even more muddled).

And it shouldn't matter what race Zimmerman identifies as, because the fact is, what you have is a guy who wants to be a cop, and stalked and shot a 17-year-old kid because he thought he could be a threat, and he was wrong about that. And that kid's dead. And in a vacuum, that should be enough to have him punished.

But, that can't be the case, because centuries ago, Europeans decided to colonise the newly-discovered Western hemisphere, and decided to abduct and enslave people from another continent, and kept them in chains for centuries more, and even when we decided maybe making them slaves was a bad idea, we still did a shitty job of trying to integrate them into society (indeed, we kept them out as much as possible and left them in a condition that wasn't much better than slavery), and even as the law changed and told them we have to at least try and do a better job and even as it's become clear that race is just a made-up concept that we created to fuck people over, we can't unring that bell. Now we have a cycle of poverty and laws being disproportionately enforced on them that's conditioned many to think darker skin colour is threatening. And, because of that, a lot of black people have died the same way Trayvon did at the hands of much less ethnically ambiguous men. And though we know as a society (or at least we should know it) that it shouldn't matter, it still does.