Equality is something everyone deserves, but it was not enforced in the Zimmerman case. Trayvon Martin, an African-American 17-year-old boy from Florida, was murdered by a neighborhood watch guard who assumed that Trayvon had stolen something that was hidden in his sweater. He just had a few sodas in his pockets that he had bought from a near drug-store.
It is clear that if Trayvon Martin had been white, then George Zimmerman, the killer, wouldn't have done a single thing to him. Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin supposedly in self-defense, but it was really because of the way he saw African-Americans. "All colored people are dangerous and criminal" was what probably went through his mind when he killed Trayvon Martin. These stereotypes have gone too far, and an incident alike cannot happen again. President Obama gave a speech after Zimmerman was declared innocent. He said that he had constantly been discriminated for having colored skin. Obama told stories of how he would go into an elevator and there would always be a lady who would grab her purse tight, or a man who moved farther away. It's a generalization that has sunk too deep, and now no one seems to be equal. The white kid is pure, the Latin kid is an illegal immigrant, the Chinese kid is a nerd, and the black kid is a thief. Those stereotypes resulted in the murder of an innocent child.
However, some people say that it couldn’t have possibly been an excused murder because Zimmerman is Latino. That’s a huge argument in this murder case because Zimmerman being Latino meant that he couldn’t have been racist against a black person. All this made sense supposedly because people are usually racist to Zimmerman since he is Latino. It would be like knowing how bad it feels like to be discriminated, therefore you wouldn’t discriminate others so that they wouldn’t have to feel the way you feel. That’s a cold-blooded lie. I understand that if Zimmerman would have been a “completely white” American, then the crime would have appeared as 100% racist because whites are supposedly the most racist. So if the killer is Latino, it changes the story and makes the murder excusable? Also, Zimmerman killed a kid who hadn’t done a single thing, and shot the gun just with an assumption in his head of Trayvon being a criminal. And assumptions come from appearance and sometimes attitudes, so the only reasonable thing that could have triggered the assumption would be Trayvon’s appearance: that he was black.
When I lived in the United States, people would be surprised when they found out that I was Ecuadorian, that I was different. First of all, they probably wouldn’t know where Ecuador is, some not even what it was. That was insulting because there would be a constant generalization against “Latinos” that made me feel like I didn’t really belong. Because I acted more like an American than an Ecuadorian when I lived in the States, I was never really bullied. However, there was a distinct line that would come between me and my friends when I would tell them where I was from. That’s not a pleasant feeling at all, because being from your country or looking this way or that is undefinable, usually not even planned. No one deserves to be punished for something so foolish and incontrollable. And no one certainly deserves to die for this superficial conviction called racism.
The only remedy for this sickness that rots our society is acceptance of others. A world balanced by seeing people through a mirror and not through a microscope is something that really inspires me. Trayvon Martin was a kid like anyone else walking the streets, and a man, blinded by constant disregards of colored people, caused him to shoot a 17-year-old child. Now Zimmerman is innocent, and therefore everyone who declared his verdict is also blind. Zimmerman deserves to be in jail, and Trayvon Martin deserves to be alive. But apparently this world isn't equal anymore.