RE: Zimmerman trial and Racism

I'm not going to comment on the outcome of the Zimmerman trial because I wasn't there in the courtroom.  And to form my opinions based on nothing other than the typical sensationalism pumped media information that's overly available would be like designing a building on bad math.  I knew the media was going to try to make this case into a big racism circus when the first pictures of both Zimmerman and Martin appeared (courtesy of our media).  Zimmerman was shown in his most recent form, and Martin was presented in his form as a 12 year old boy when he was actually 17 years old at the time of the incident.  And this was displayed this way in most stories for days with little or no footnotes about that deception.

Statistically, Native Americans likely have the highest incident per group of alcoholism and drunk driving. Does anyone with a brain honestly believe that it's because they are genetically an "Indian" - and drunkenness is  symptom or predisposition of their actual race? No, it's because we have laws and/or policies which have helped shaped their culture in some of those negative ways causing that behavior to be more predominant in that group. 

Our laws and policies specifically address their race and provide them special considerations.  Similarly, we have laws and policies about other minorities which also create a divisional impact. Most black police officers will admit that if 4 people are suspect of a drug crime and one is black, the black one will get the most scrutiny, even by a black officer. Because, statistically, blacks are caught up in these situations more often.  It's not because they're black that they're statistically the most probable suspects.  It's because we have  policies, laws and considerations for their race which have created and/or maintained a negative social condition for them, leading them to be involved in more crimes.  With multiple generations of children now who are truly color blind, the real racism that remains is what was written into our laws and policies that remains. 

Through the best attempts to make the information about actual differences in performance based on race unavailable because of the uproar such creates ("The Bell Curve") real science about what advantages and disadvantages each race typically has is absent.  But we all still base judgements off empirical data nonetheless.  If you're choosing the students to be on your basketball team, and they're all about the same height and you know nothing else about them, chances are you're going to choose the black students first.  If you're picking team mates for your math team and the choice of students all get about the same grades, you'll probably pick mostly Asians. 

When given a "choice" there has to be some criteria we use to decide or it's not a choice, it's just a random drawing.  Obesity maybe more inherent in one race than another, but if I'm choosing teammates for a Sumo tag team, I'm going to pick the fattest kids.  If most of the fat ones in my group happen to be white, someone could say that I'm being racist but that wasn't the case at all.  If it turns out indeed that whites are statistically the most obese for whatever reason, then the fact that the  results of my choosing would mirror the reality statistics simply on a probability basis.

In my life, on the average, I've found the biggest underachievers in life to be those who were spoiled the most and never had to really try to do anything.  Likewise, the biggest achievers (relative to their starting point) have often had to do it alone, without help from anyone.  In this instance, I consider outside additional support an actual handicap.   

Special considerations based on race, whether those considerations benefit or inhibit those individuals creates a divide in either case.  We can't treat people the same, if our government still doesn't treat them the same.  And if they're not treated the same, we can't expect their groupings to behave the same.  If that difference in behavior is noted, it will then be associated with the race and not the cause.  Racism is still very much alive in our laws and policies. If we truly want to end it once and for all we need to start by ending it there.