The stereotype of black menace pre-determined Trayvon Martin’s fate

Evidence

Zimmerman’s “reasonable fear”—the threshold for his use of the “stand your ground” defense—was no ordinary response to a perceived threat. Trayvon Martin was a young black man, wearing a hoodie in a neighborhood in which Zimmerman thought he didn’t belong. And in our culture, young black men dressed like Martin and in the “wrong” place are presumed dangerous. … 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