It seems more like Trayvon Martin was convicted of attempter murder, doesn't it?

Trayvon Martin’s posthumous conviction for assault with intent to kill, along with the letters here justifying that conviction, show the longevity of the South’s Myth of the Black Brute. Southern slaveholders created this myth to justify their abuse of blacks. After the Civil War they continued it to justify their virtual re-enslavement of blacks.

In the 1970s the GOP inherited it as part of Nixon’s Southern Strategy–only now it’s hidden in terms like "Urban Drug Gang" and "Chicago." Meanwhile America’s criminal "justice" system prosecutes and sentences blacks vastly out of proportion to whites arrested for similar crimes.

This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the huge number of jailed black men used to justify imprisoning even more black men (and then disenfranchising them).

In reality, poor uneducated blacks are about as likely to commit violent crimes as poor uneducated whites; ditto black doctors vs. white doctors. What drives violent crime is poverty, undereducation, police misbehavior, easy access to firearms...and being Southern. The South’s cult of violent "honor" stems from the brutal exigencies of slavery, living on in these Stand Your Ground laws.

"For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived, and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."


--John F. Kennedy