Possibly the most sickening thing about America is its racial selectivity. White person kills white person. Zzzzz. Black person kills black person. Zzzzz. Black person kills white person. Zzzzz. White person kills black person — the world stops. Or explodes.
(And if the person doing the shooting is not quite white, à la George Zimmerman, you can add a little bleach, dubbing him a “white Hispanic.”)
It’s not just that some life is held to be more valuable than other life. It’s that the value of life is measured by the color of the person who takes it. Which is a little weird, at a minimum.
Michael Brown’s life or Trayvon Martin’s life would be just as valuable if a person of a different color had done the shooting. But we would not know the victims’ names, of course. (It was proposed that an asteroid be named after Trayvon Martin. I don’t know whether the proposal was carried out.)
I realize that Al Sharpton, Rand Paul, and the rest of America can’t react to the fall of every sparrow. And I know full well about the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. But maybe we could mix it up a little, for variety’s sake?