Trayvon Martin's Case And Racial Identity By Walter Mosley

Stories of the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin were seen and heard on nearly every news outlet and radio station beginning in February of 2012. On the night of February 26th, 2012 Trayvon Martin, an African-American teenager was walking home from a 7/11 convenience store carrying a small bag containing an Arizona iced tea beverage and a bag of skittles. On his way home, Martin was gunned downed in the streets of a gated community in the state of Florida by 28-year-old white resident George Zimmerman. While Martin was unarmed and had no criminal intent in mind, Zimmerman claimed to fear for his safety. This led to Zimmerman shooting Martin several times, which Martin shortly after died from. George Zimmerman was later found not guilty

Author Walter Mosley argues that in order to seek justice in cases such as Trayvon Martin's, one has to separate the racial identity of those involved from the actual crime. Mosley says that people identify the race of the accused criminal and focus a majority of their anger on that instead of the crime itself. He discusses that when people focus more on the race it becomes more of a race problem that is perpetrated by the media, which takes the focus off of the actual crime itself (Mosley). While, Walter Mosley addresses a valid point about the legal case of Trayvon Martin, he does not give enough reasoning in his article to effectively argue his

He presents his audience with the idea that when race becomes a major component in a criminal case people lose focus on the actual crime itself. Which is true, in cases such as Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown the focus stemmed around the races of the victims and the accused assailant, not who they were or whether their actions were right or wrong or right. The media coverage of the cases seemed more determined to depict the assailants as racist that majority of the coverage was spent on the race instead of the violent nature of the