A new coat of paint

Here are some of my thoughts on the Zimmerman verdict.

As a disclaimer, I don't believe the George Zimmerman is a card carrying racist or anything like that. In my opinion he's a hothead who let his emotions and paranoia get the better of him.

However, the allegedly post racial crowd that lauded the Zimmerman verdict needs to be honest about something. If you gave the participants in the altercation a new coat of paint, shall we say, they probably wouldn't have been so quick to support him. 

If Trayvon were a white kid named Tucker, most of the pro-Zimmerman crowd would be asking what GZ was doing hopping out of his car to follow random boys down the street like some kind of creeper. They'd point out, quite correctly that his suspicions, real or imagined, could have been cleared up by pulling up by him and engaging in polite conversation. They certainly wouldn't have bought his first "I didn't know what street I was on" excuse. Seriously, he was a neighborhood watch who didn't know the layout of his own neighborhood? The only reason anyone even gave that excuse a thought was because Trayvon was black.

Tucker could have had all Ds and Fs, dealt crystal meth out of the school bathroom, and a whole host of other things that are several hundred times worse than anything Trayvon allegedly did, but no one would be going through his school records to try and find a reason he deserved to be shot the way they did with Trayvon this past year. There would have been no leaks. No one would be combing through his Facebook trying to put him on trial.

However, the people supporting GZ would be looking more closely at his past and asking questions about why a guy who was unstable enough to slug a cop (to punch an armed police officer you have to be outside your mind) was running around with a gun. They'd accuse the county of corruption, letting him off easy because he was related to a government official. And  if that government official was a Democrat, Fox News would have an even bigger field day. Hispanic guy connected to government official escapes felony, turns around and stalks and shoots a kid? The anti-Big Government headlines on Fox and National Review write themselves.

The same intrepid citizen journalists who found a Twitter of a random kid also named Trayvon to try and paint him as a thug (even though their Trayvon was in New York) would have dug up everything they could on George  Zimmerman. And found his old MySpace which, spoiler alert, is very interesting.

Do I think Zimmerman is a card carrying racist? No. But many of his supporters would have changed their tune if Trayvon had a different coat of paint.