Ebony Magazine has been under attack for its cover showing Travon Martin’s family and headline: “We are all Trayvon now.” Some conservatives have expressed outrage at the cover as trying to stoke racial resentment at the Zimmerman verdict. Stacia L. Brown responds:
“Regardless of our personal opinions about the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the black community has felt an acute sense of responsibility to the boy he killed. That boy is like too many others who have been gunned down prematurely, due to circumstances beyond their control. In Trayvon’s case, the circumstance was racial profiling. The circumstance was his being viewed as suspicious because of his profile in the dark. For prosecutors and a jury to ignore race as a precipitous factor in this case has been almost as unsettling as the fact that the teen was murdered in the first place.
…The “controversy” is absurd but the attitudes it reveals call for persistent and serious attention. We are as weary of hearing that Trayvon wasn’t killed because he was black as Tea Partyers are of seeing our hoodies. We wish this were a protest we didn’t have to undertake. But as long as the school-to-prison pipeline exists, as long as a judge can spend five years fraudulently sentencing black children to jail before his misdeeds are uncovered; as long as poverty and bureaucracy continue to ensure that the education of black children is not a priority; and as long as cases involving men opening fire on unarmed black youth occur, this will be a battle worth waging.” -Stacia L. Brown, Salon
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/08/the_rights_ridiculous_ebony_outrage/