#WTFFlorida

It is now official: It is again completely legal to kill an unarmed black teenager in Florida, even if you instigated the fight. I thought that at LEAST manslaughter would stick, but not so. There is no justice for the family...unless they take Zimmerman to civil court. I REALLY hope they take him to civil court.

At the base of this whole horrible, shameful situation, we have a pretty simple story: An overzealous ass who wanted to play “Cops & Robbers” provoked a fight with a hormone and testosterone-addled teenager. Fake cop realised he bit off more than he could chew, panicked, and shot the teenager with whom he instigated the fight. Because of the “He’s coming right for us” law in the state in which this all happened, Fake cop got off free after killing someone, claiming he was “standing his ground”. That could have been the end of the conversation, but this is the United States of G-d Damn 'Merica, and when we do a clusterf***, we do it BIG! We're going to make this the biggest piece of rage porn since...well, last week, when Texas kept pushing to make women illegal.

The teenager was black and had a somewhat clouded history of suspensions and fights and drug use. The fake cop had a clouded history of being a slightly unhinged wannabe real cop. This all happened in Florida, a state known for being slightly dysfunctional. If you don’t believe me, look up @_FloridaMan on Twitter. Holy. F***ing. S***.

Florida has a sordid past when it comes to suppressing brown people’s rights. There were about 250 lynchings there from 1881 to 1935 alone, and that is not counting the kangaroo courts that convicted black men and women of crimes that sometimes didn’t even exist, just to execute them. That also doesn’t count the segregation laws, voting laws, the excessive police harassment, and the chain gangs that one could “join” at very young ages for offences as minor as not yielding to a white person walking in one’s path. Incidentally, chain gangs are back. Yay, progress.

This case didn’t have to be about race. It could have just been about a s****y gun law. There are only a few times that Stand Your Ground could even be feasibly used, and those times are already covered under existing self defence laws. In fact, a woman in Jacksonville fired a warning shot at her abusive husband and used the Stand Your Ground defence. She got 20 years.This woman was black. Florida made this about race.

I hear the police are beefing up and preparing for riots in Sanford, FL and surrounding counties. It is 2013, for crying out loud! Black people are not animals or unruly, overgrown children, despite how people would like to portray us. We are human beings. When you know of the history of the misrepresentation of your character, and when you see the social repercussions of nearly 400 years of misrepresentation in every aspect of your country’s culture, and when the people who continue to perpetuate this misrepresentation tell you that racism is over and we need to get over it because someone black got to a higher position than before, you have a right to be angry. The gut instinct of ANY human being who always sees images in the of him/herself overly sexualised and made to look like an unhinged, violent brute is to be a offended. We cannot get too angry, though, even though it would be human nature to be, because the second we so much as raise our voices, pundits will say, “See? They are more aggressive. Zimmerman’s life was in danger!” So we hold it all in and process our anger in better ways than violence. I guess with the exception of Oakland, and though race-related incidents have sparked riots in the past, we’ve grown. Florida has not.

The only thing that this whole terrible incident prove is that Florida has really terrible gun laws that they exercise subjectively, and if you are a black man in the United States, you STILL have to pretend like bulls*** like some a**hole following you because he thinks you “look suspicious” holding your Skittles bothers you less than it really does.

Seriously. What the f***, America?