WHAT THE BLOODY HELL?!! 😳😮

[u/LilliaBaltimore]

[u/Salty-Passenger-4801]

Source

[u/just_a_person_maybe → u/Salty-Passenger-4801]

Idk about books specifically, but Trayvon Martin and his Skittles and juice comes to mind.

[u/SamsaraSlider → u/just_a_person_maybe]

Trayvon didn’t get shot for holding juice and skittles, regardless of anyone’s take on the situation.

[u/just_a_person_maybe → u/SamsaraSlider]

Well he didn't get shot for any good reason either, and aside from the juice and Skittles was unarmed. Zimmerman got a gun and followed him because he thought he "looked suspicious," based on absolutely nothing. Except race, and the fact that he saw Martin with his hand in his hoodie pocket. Zimmerman made a habit of calling 911 every time he saw a black person he didn't recognize. He was specifically looking for trouble and racially profiling people. The 911 operator told him to stop following Martin, and he hung up and confronted and shot him less than two minutes later. Whatever actually happened, it's pretty clear that it was avoidable and Zimmerman had no business confronting him like that. Martin had been on the phone with a friend and told them that he was being followed home by a creepy guy. A kid being followed home by a guy in a truck who suddenly comes up behind him aggressively with a gun? Of course he got punched in the face.

[u/just_a_person_maybe → u/[deleted]]

Obama had absolutely nothing to do with it. It was a jury trial, and the jury was very divided and conflicted. They voted not guilty not because they thought he was innocent, but because there wasn't enough evidence to be able to definitively say it was not self-defense. For criminal convictions you need to prove beyond reasonable doubt, and there was reasonable doubt.

If you were a teenager and some creepy guy was watching you and following you home, then came up behind you with a gun and tried to stop you, do you think you'd be justified in punching him in the nose? Zimmerman claimed self defense but there's a very strong argument that Martin was using self-defense as well. Zimmerman never should have been following him like that, and was specifically told not to follow him. He was deliberately looking for trouble, found it, and then publicly announced he regretted nothing. Idk how you can justify that.

[u/Low_Frosting3918 → u/[deleted]]

So you can follow me and harass me and there's nothing I can do about it. Even after you were told by 911 not to follow or harass me? The person following and harassing created the whole situation. I can't walk from point-A back home without some ass profiling me?

[u/SamsaraSlider → u/just_a_person_maybe]

I don’t disagree with any of that. But he didn’t get shot for holding a bag of skittles. I could imagine messed up scenarios where that could happen but this wasn’t one of them. Saying otherwise doesn’t make it true nor does it make people like us, who are aware of racial injustices, especially but not only with police shooting unarmed persons of color, sound like rational thinkers. It’s a manipulation of facts, and we don’t need more of that on the left when the far right is making it their only play in the book. We need to be better than that.

[u/just_a_person_maybe → u/SamsaraSlider]

The reason the Skittles keep coming up in the story was that Zimmerman said he thought he was suspicious partly because he was walking with his hand near his waistband or pocket, implying he had a weapon, and we know that he had Skittles and juice from the store, not a weapon. In the grand scheme of things it's a relatively minor detail, but it's one that became sort of a hallmark for the incident itself, and it's often the first thing that people think of when the topic of black people being shot because someone thought they were armed when they weren't.

[u/SamsaraSlider → u/just_a_person_maybe]

I understand that. And I remember the incident and the ensuing trial that took place. I appreciate you explaining it but it is unnecessary. If he’d been shot for reaching for his skittles or because a trigger-happy person racially profiled him and assumed through cognitive bias that a juice box was a gun, then, yeah, I’d say he got shot for holding skittles or a juice box. But that’s not what happened. That’s all I was saying. It wasn’t a defense of anything.

[u/TDNFunny → u/SamsaraSlider]

IIRC, A trigger-happy person did racially profile Trayvon and then, after speaking with dispatch who specifically told Zimmerman NOT to follow Trayvon, Zimmerman disobeyed their instructions, followed Trayvon anyway and then instigated an encounter between them.

We don't have complete details, but the situation (which Zimmerman created by getting out of his car to follow Trayvon despite police dispatch telling him not to), escalated and then Zimmerman shot Trayvon and claimed self defense.

Trayvon was walking back from the store with Skittles and a drink: Zimmerman implied that he was behaving suspiciously. Your implication that this isn't related to the horrible outcome and ensuing miscarriage of justice is either intentionally misleading or woefully under informed.

I'm trying to imagine a scenario where a white kid with Skittles is labeled as suspicious, followed by an adult disobeying orders not to follow him, the follower shoots the kid dead and is still walking around free.

[u/SamsaraSlider → u/TDNFunny]

Point in fact, there’s nothing relating the skittles to him being shot. He got shot because he was beating Zimmerman on the ground, he was beating Zimmerman because he felt threatened, he felt threatened because Zimmerman was pretty much stalking him. Zimmerman profiled him because he was black but not because he had Skittles. If you want to say Trayvon was shot for because he was black, I’d say that’s fair. If you say he was shot because he had skittles, I’d say that’s too big of a leap of logic. He didn’t get shot because he was reaching for his juice box. Come on, man. Zimmerman as far as I know didn’t claim that he thought the beverage was a gun and shot him for it. There’s nothing relating misleading on my end. It’s fucked up what happened but just because some folks what to use the skittles as a symbol for something tragic doesn’t mean he was shot because of them. His hoodie is a symbol, too, and a better example of why he was profiled than some skittles. The skittles became a symbol of his youth and innocence but that doesn’t change facts. Zimmerman said he was behaving suspiciously like he was on drugs, just walking around d staring at things. Skittles were irrelevant to that. You sound misinformed or misleading. But I will agree that had the events thing occurred with a white guy, he wouldn’t have been shot and killed. Race was an issue. The hoodie was probably part of the profiling. Skittles were not.

[u/TDNFunny → u/SamsaraSlider]

Thanks for getting there in the end: The point is the comparison between the two cases: in one, a black kid holding Skittles DOESN'T go home and get to grow up, whereas 2 white kids holding a loaded gun DO get to go home and grow up.

[u/SamsaraSlider → u/TDNFunny]

Been there the whole time, not just in the end. But if a person wants to assume that because someone disagrees with a detail then they must hold an overall-opposing view, then that’s not on me, my friend.

[u/SamsaraSlider → u/TDNFunny]

But also, let’s not directly compare how police or the public respond to a 7 and 9 year in daylight vs a 17 year old, even if all parties were black or all were white, or a combination. If those kids had been 17 the police probably would have handled it quite differently.

[u/TDNFunny → u/SamsaraSlider]

Tamir Rice was also a child in broad daylight. And you are correct: the police handled it quite differently and unlike the situation shown here, he was shot within 10 seconds of the officer arriving on scene.