A response to ‘Martin got what he deserved’

By Jonathan Capehart

Some fellow named Rick, who has emailed me from two different addresses since last week, really didn’t like what I had to say about Sean Hannity’s interview with George Zimmerman. His first email came Thursday morning, the day after the killer of Trayvon Martin said he had “no regrets.” The second one came later that day. And ever since he has emailed asking for a response. “I will send this to you ‘ad-infinitum' until I get a reasonable and rationale [sic] response from you,” Rick wrote me via email Saturday night.
Well, Rick here comes your answer.


This combo made from file photos shows Trayvon Martin, left, and George Zimmerman. (AP) “One of the burdens of being a black male is carrying the heavy weight of other people’s suspicions,” I wrote at the outset of the national furor over Zimmerman not being in jail for killing Trayvon. We already know that Trayvon brings out the worst in people. But Rick’s racist rant — complete with misspellings and poor grammar — gives my statement renewed relevance as he joins far too many others in denigrating the life of a person he didn’t know by using stereotypes to justify his hate.
Much in the way Sanford Police Detectives dissected Zimmerman’s call to the department that rainy night on Feb. 26, I dissect Rick’s missive. Would that folks like Rick gave Trayvon the same benefit of the doubt they are demanding be given to Zimmerman.

I read your response in regards to the Hannity/Zimmerman interview. It is so full of holes a semi truck can drive thru the huge gaps you leave.
Martin broke this guys [sic] nose and was pounding his head into the concrete... he probably was in the process of killing him before he got (justifiably) shot.

This requires us to believe Zimmerman’s version of events. Understandable simply because we only have his side of the story. Trayvon is dead. Clearly, there was some kind of physical fight as Zimmerman’s injuries attest. Yet, few if any Zimmerman supporters seem to ask themselves this question: What would you do if you were a 17-year-old staying as a guest in a neighborhood not your own and were accosted by a stranger who you noticed had been following you in a car?
Besides, as I’ve written many times, Zimmerman’s story is the one “full of holes.” For instance, I’m still trying to figure out how Trayvon’s hands were found under his body when Zimmerman told police in several interviews that he pulled Trayvon’s arms away from his body mere seconds before police arrived.  

Martin is just another typical example of an "angry, black, and totally uneducated" product of black culture which believes in Jerry Springer tactics for problem resolution.

What this portion of Rick’s racist rant ignores is a report from Trayvon’s teacher at Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School in Miami where he was a junior. He was “an A and B student who majored in cheerfulness,” she said. Nothing that I have seen since that February report disputes that.
Trayvon spent some time at the George T. Baker Aviation School after his regular school day because he wanted to be involved in aviation either as a pilot or a mechanic. He used to help his father Tracy Martin when he coached little league baseball. His father also credited Trayvon with saving him from a fire when he was just 9 years old.
Sure, Trayvon was suspended from school three times, including for being found with a plastic baggie that had traces of marijuana. Trayvon is hardly the first teenager of any race caught dabbling in doobies. Yet, this seeming rite of adolescent passage has given people like Rick an excuse to brand Trayvon a hard-core thug itching to kill someone for the hell of it, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

A culture of which over 70% of black children being born today are yoked with a single parent environment (usually the Mother) and non=parental existance [sic].

Rick knows zilch about black culture, otherwise he wouldn’t make such a sweeping generalization. But he did nail this one statistic. Rick must be basing it on the National Survey of Family Growth 2006-2010 from the National Center for Health Statistics that was reported on by USA Today in April.
Yes, 70.4 percent of African American women with children are not married to the fathers of those children. But that data point masks the 54.4 percent of black mothers married to (29.6 percent) or cohabiting with (24.4 percent) their baby daddy, as the saying goes. Still, there’s no denying that 46 percent of black women raising children on their own is of great concern.
In his screed against what he sees as black culture, Rick conveniently ignores the fact that while Trayvon’s parents divorced when he was 4-years-old, his father was very much in his life. Tracy Martin lived near his son and ex-wife in Miami Gardens. That would make Trayvon unlike most of the children Rick denigrates.

Why not write about the murders/shootings that are going on in Chicago right now (where I live, and have been occurring for quite some time I might add, and at record=breaking numbers) that is pretty much 'black-on-black' crime? Nobody in the MSM reports this

Fair point to ask why I’m not writing about the murders/shootings in Chicago. Then, again, anyone anywhere would have to wonder why I’m not writing about the mayhem in their community. Notice I haven’t written a word about the horror in Aurora. Sometimes writers let other writers speak for them.
What’s so irksome in this particular paragraph is the concern about “‘black-on-black’ crime.” Nothing is more annoying than people espousing the worst racist garbage about African Americans paying lip service to the very real problem of black-on-black crime. A problem that hasn’t escaped my attention, as “The color of murder and gun violence in New York” attests. If they are so concerned about this where were their voices before Trayvon was killed by Zimmerman?

Why not write about the so called 'flash mobs' that are primarily 'black' driven, and are causing huge problems and concerns among the business community? Martin got what he deserved...

Trayvon was returning from a 7-Eleven convenience store with a can of iced tea and a bag of Skittles. The unarmed 17-year-old was wearing a hoodie and talking on the phone with his girlfriend. He would die just 100 yards away from where he was staying at the Retreat at Twin Lakes. He didn’t deserve to die. And he most certainly didn’t dese