Trayvon Martin Does Not RIP

"I'll shoot any White Man who looks like a Republican," said Tim Dillinger, a white male member of what Elizabeth suggested be called our "neighborhood watch" group.

Black families tell about the moments when they have to have "the talk" with their sons, not about sex, but about how a young black man is in danger, because white people see him as dangerous, regardless of how nice or smart or gentle he really is.

Whites see young black men, especially one wearing a hoodie (masking his features, hiding his face), as hoodlums out to do no good: like Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida, who had just gone to get a snack at the convenience store.

I know what Sanford used to be like. I lived in a swamp to the west of town, near Oviedo. It's all subdivisions now, but then, we lived down a sand road from a 70-acre celery field. A crew of local (black) farmworkers picked during the celery season, and it was an assembly line going down the field: picking, processing, packaging and loading celery on a truck for northern markets. The farmworkers told me they worked for about six months, and then went on welfare for the rest of the year.

In effect, the state and local governments' welfare payments subsidized lower celery prices in northern, winter markets. But, of course, local whites saw welfare recipients as shiftless and worthless, a separate caste apart.

So now, in one of those spiffy new developments, with curving streets, cul-de-sacs and guarded entrances, a neighborhood watch "commander" follows an African American youth--against police cellphone advice--may have some confrontation with him, and then shoots him dead.

It's not entirely surprising that in the new Sanford, the police do nothing, even when Zimmerman, the shooter, confesses--no, he reports, claiming Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law and self defense. No one mentions the word 'crime.' A crime was committed here: a young man was killed in cold blood.

Yet, both Rush Limbaugh and President Obama call it "a tragedy."

Why isn't it a murder? How would you feel if the normal was the quote that begins this piece: if white men who looked like Republicans were the ones most in danger of being shot by a neighborhood watch group? In other words, this is all about race; about how black people are always suspicious, and white people are not.

Romans had slaves and free, but of all races, and divided free subjects into honored and humble classes: the US has always had at least two castes: black and white. Now, there are more, differentiated by color and ethnicity. Zimmerman was enforcing caste separation in the way most upper castes do: with violence.

Maybe, with Colorofchange and other groups, Sanford, Florida's police may now know: killing people, even of another race, is no longer acceptable, because we are all people and our other labels don't count.