Racial stereotypes made Martin a presumptive threat before any encounter

Evidence

No matter what Trayvon Martin was doing (buying a bag of Skittles) or who he was (his father actually lived in the subdivision), he was invisible to Zimmerman. The stereotype of young black men as the menace described by Rivera obstructed Zimmerman’s vision. The conditions for Martin’s murder were set well before that fateful encounter. He was by definition a threat to someone’s life. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 221

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that murder conditions were ‘set well before the encounter’ compresses Glaude’s core structural argument into a single sharp formulation.