What’s Happening: Trayvon Martin callousness
Lots of people are complaining that we are “still” talking about Trayvon Martin, as if the death of a teenager isn’t worth speaking about. My privileged white male friends are going on about how if he were white we wouldn’t be hearing about him; that’s probably true, because if he were white, I think his shooter would be in jail right now—and he would have been taken into custody immediately following the shooting. Anyhow, whatever your opinion about the case, you must agree that these teens posing as a dead Trayvon are despicable and that their attitude about it has to come from somewhere.
I’d also like to share this meme, which poses the question, “What if Trayvon had been your daughter?” In a nutshell, say your daughter was walking home in a hoodie one night and a stranger approached her. Feeling threatened, she uses the pepper spray you bought her and bam, the stranger shoots her, claims self-defense and gets off scot-free. Does this not put it into perspective? Why does Martin get a pass for shooting when feeling threatened, but America can’t seem to give a 17-year-old boy a pass for being stalked and threatened (and murdered) by a grown man?
Also in despicable news this week: When Caroline Criado-Perez fought for another woman on England’s money notes and won, the victory would have been much sweeter had it not been for the Internet trolls who made rape threats to her for a full 48 hours after the victory. When a woman cannot create change without men making violent threats at her for it—when she can’t even open her mouth without it, really—something is wrong, and you cannot deny the existence of rape culture like this. Fortunately, her ordeal did shed some light on how people can pretty much do whatever they want on Twitter, and the pressure is mounting on the social network to take a stand against such violence. Arrests have even been made of some of the stalkers on Twitter.
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia