I was talking with a co-worker of mine last week. Her son is 13, just a few years younger than Trayvon Martin. She's educated - graduated from the Naval Academy. She's well traveled. She also can't fathom what the entire world has against black men, against her son. She wonders why the darker a mans skin, the more evil people perceive him to be. She worries about the world she will send her son out into. I don't blame her. I worry about it too.
Is it really any wonder that black men are looked at as being less than other people? All over the world, under the rule of English Imperialism, he started out enslaved. Most of the rest of the world awarded him his freedom because they eventually realized that he was just a darker, if lesser, version of themselves. Not us. We has to fight a war over it. After the war was over, we had to pass laws to make sure he didn't become uppity. We told stories about black men who would come into people's homes in the dead I might and rape white women. We turned the black man into a villain.
And we wonder why an entire group of people who's skin is dark have trouble rising out of the abject poverty forced on their fore fathers. Those stories are still being told. He's just living up to our expectations.
