Trayvon Martin Case

To be completely honest, I do not know too much about the Trayvon Martin Case. I heard about it once on the radio when I was driving to school one day. The name "Trayvon Martin" just sounded familiar but I did not know anything about the actual case. After I did some research on the internet, I learned that Trayvon Martin was an African-American who was shot by George Zimmerman. George was the neighborhood watchman and he thought that Trayvon looked suspicious. He called the police and told them that he was going to follow him because he looked like he was up to something and the police said not to follow him. Zimmerman disregarded what the police told him, and he continued to follow him and shot him out of "self-defense" (according to George). No charges were pressed against Zimmerman which made the event very controversial.

I really think that the Trayvon Martin Case is very sad and I definitely see how it is a very controversial topic. It definitely would not be as talked about as it is now if there were actually charges pressed against George Zimmerman. In my opinion, it was clearly a racist issue. The explanation that he shot Trayvon "out of self-defense" was a justification of the real reason why he shot him. There was probably quite a bit of racial tension, and the shooter wanted to get a point across. This can be backed up by when Zimmerman called the police and completely disregarded what they said to him which was to not follow Trayvon anymore. If Zimmerman would have not had any racial tension with Trayvon, he would have just listened to the police in the first place and the whole shooting and controversy would not have even happened. The whole Trayvon Martin shooting incident definitely relates to the essential question of how are we, as individuals, "products" of our environments as well as the how are we, as individuals, tied to our own past? The first question relates to this case because of all the racism going on in the world right now, Zimmerman might have felt pressured to shoot Trayvon Martin because it is what other people were telling him to do. The second question relates to this topic because the shooter might have something happen in his past that made him want to get revenge on a person. He might have had an incident with an African-American person earlier in his life which then resulted in his shooting of Trayvon.