Source: Colorlines.com

Like millions of others, I have been following the fight to bring George Zimmerman to justice for racially profiling, stalking and fatally shooting 17-year-old unarmed featherweight Trayvon Martin in late February.

During what has become a thrice-daily ritual, I have watched an unbruised and easily breathing Zimmerman remain upright immediately after he was allegedly attacked by Martin. I have heard the audio of the 9-1-1 dispatcher telling the self-appointed neighborhood watch captain to quit following Martin. I have watched Martin’s parents ask for the most rudimentary symbol of justice, an arrest, and posted my hoodie shot in solidarity.

Up until the Zimmerman camp unleashed their epic victim-blaming assault, my pie-in-the-sky butt still believed that they would admit that Trayvon Martin didn’t deserve to die, that his corpse should not have been drug- and alcohol-tested, that his parents should not have had to collect him from the morgue.

I’m not dumb. I’ve read lots of books, articles, poems, prose, body language, Morse code, and smoke signals. But, apparently, I still haven’t gotten it through my nappy head that blackness and maleness equal a criminality punishable by freelance execution. READ MORE

Akiba Solomon writes Colorlines’ Gender Matters blog and is an NABJ-Award winning writer, freelance journalist, editor and essayist from West Philadelphia. A graduate of Howard University, the Brooklyn resident co-edited Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips, and Other Parts (Perigee, 2005), an anthology of original essays and oral memoirs about Black women and body image