if the other side refuses to do their part.
Did you not notice that this is addressed in the speech? I have copied the relevant section below.
Who ARE following you. At any rate, we apparently think it's okish, or the Stand Your Ground laws wouldn't exist.
I'm frankly surprised that you are so strongly against Trayvon. If someone was following you or your kid with potentially malicious intent, how would you react? Would there be no blustery anger at all? At the point this happened, he was still just a kid walking in a neighborhood - not a kid running up to beat anybody who got close.
What I'm guessing you'll never agree is that I think the two MUST coexist. A "victim mentality" exists for reasons, not just because people want it. So we have to both acknowledge those reasons AND try to make forward strides. Our arguments on this always come down to the same thing - you can't wait until someone completely stops doing something you don't like before you stop treating them in ways they don't like.
Or, he said that he could have been a young man followed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I suppose you can't quite get yourself there. Willful misinterpretation annoys me as much as it annoys you, I imagine.
Did you read the speech? He did talk about the disproportionate number of blacks in jail, and he did say that changes need to be made. He just doesn't let us ignore that there may also be some reasons for that other than that some people are ... what? naturally bad? Read it, then tell me what else you would rather he said. Maybe more "but the people who think these things are wrong, and they should just grow up"?
And so the fact that sometimes that’s unacknowledged adds to the frustration. And the fact that a lot of African American boys are painted with a broad brush and the excuse is given, well, there are these statistics out there that show that African American boys are more violent -- using that as an excuse to then see sons treated differently causes pain.
I think the African American community is also not naïve in understanding that, statistically, somebody like Trayvon Martin was statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else. So folks understand the challenges that exist for African American boys. But they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there’s no context for it and that context is being denied. And that all contributes I think to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.
Now, the question for me at least, and I think for a lot of folks, is where do we take this? How do we learn some lessons from this and move in a positive direction? I think it’s understandable that there have been demonstrations and vigils and protests, and some of that stuff is just going to have to work its way through, as long as it remains nonviolent. If I see any violence, then I will remind folks that that dishonors what happened to Trayvon Martin and his family. But beyond protests or vigils, the question is, are there some concrete things that we might be able to do.