Black Sheep.

An Ongoing Discussion/Moment of Clarity.

words.

"Our society considers young black men to be dangerous, interchangeable, expendable, guilty until proven innocent. This is the conversation about race that we desperately need to have — but probably, as in the past, will try our best to avoid.

...The conversation we need to have is about how black men, even black boys, are denied the right to be young, to be vulnerable, to make mistakes. We need to talk about why, for example, black men are no more likely than white men to smoke marijuana but nearly four times as likely to be arrested for it — and condemned to a dead-end cycle of incarceration and unemployment. I call this racism. What do you call it?

Trayvon Martin was fighting more than George Zimmerman that night. He was up against prejudices as old as American history, and he never had a chance."

THE WASHINGTON POST: Black boys denied the right to be young

SEE ALSO:

THE WASHINGTON POST: Trayvon Martin and the stolen youth of black children

THE NEW YORK TIMES: The Whole System Failed

ESQUIRE: WHAT GEORGE ZIMMERMAN CAN DO NOW

GAWKER: The Zimmerman Jury Told Young Black Men What We Already Knew