The boy with the bag of Skittles in his hands is guilty again.

It would seem that carrying a bag of Skittles or a cell phone can get you killed here in the land of the free and brave. But that would not be an accurate description of what happens in the US. It is not just any 17-year-old child holding a bag of Skittles who is murdered by a full-grown man with a gun, claiming self-defense.

There are plenty of young men and old men walking about on the streets with attire announcing their affiliation with one form of anti-Black, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant ideology or another. And many of them carry more than bags of Skittles!

It is a “free country,” too, for men, peculiar, but white, who can kidnap young girls and teens, hold them captive for years, with neighbors not recalling seeing anything unusual. What is unusual about the gathering of skinheads or the occasional revelations about kidnappers and sadists, peculiar, but neighborly?

Americans are trained to be on the look out for the unusual.

Trayvon Martin was unusual! Martin was a Black boy whose color showed up quite well and unmistakably Black in a predominately white neighborhood.

Martin’s historical grandparents, parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, those who argued for the right to feed, educate, and defend their community against the “civic-minded” like George Zimmerman and the judicial apparatus anywhere in the US, were, for the most part, executed or incarcerated to ensure that such an ideology of self-defense among this population would be forever effectively killed.

The Zimmermans of the free world have once again defended themselves before pesky “I am a Man” and “Black is Beautiful” propaganda take hold of the nation’s political, social, and cultural spheres.

We are passed that now! The old days are the new days!

In “Open Season on Black Boys After A Verdict Like This” (The Guardian, July 14, 2013), columnist Gary Younge is right to argue that white men can chase Black boys and murder them without fear of “justice,” since “justice” acquits the hunter.

Who screamed? Who was stronger? Who called whom what and when and why are all details to warm the heart of a cable news producer with 24 hours to fill? Strip them all away and the truth remains that Martin’s heart would still be beating if Zimmerman had not chased him down and shot him.

When confronted by the unusual, white America, in fear for its own existence, will always see the need to defend itself - Skittles or no Skittles!

Black Americans can never be “innocent” in the way white Americans are “innocent,” so long as the US Empire’s first deployment in its war against terrorism is fear. White Americans will respond in accordance to the nation’s uneasy relations with its Black citizens.

While many Americans feign ignorance of history and others “look to the future,” there remains in the unusual, those millions kidnapped and tortured, those ships, loaded inhumanely, with the captives chained and the sadist and business-minded free to produce goods and wealth, those enslaved, toilers on the landscape by day and terrified girls and women by the nighty excursions of fathers and sons and any male determined to establish the civility of his own immorality.

How do you attempt to forget and erase forever those charred bodies at the picnics on a Sunday afternoon after church services?

How does one defend themselves against those who, when setting their gaze on a Black child, woman or man, sees this history, but contrarily identifies with immorality?

For the verdict is - that the US Empire is always morally right, even when immorality stares them in the face!

“That’s the rub!”

Zimmerman has the gun and what does he see?

You cannot legislate morality and what laws are in place about killing, even the unarmed, children, are justified on grounds of self-defense. Go to any village in Iraq or in Afghanistan and ask its residents to recall the nightly visits by American troops, righteously hunting for the unusual to protect the innocent.

An “acquittal” is the US Empire’s standard response to any charge of immorality regarding its domestic and foreign policies.

We see what those in the centrifuge of fear cannot see. We should pity them but for the loss of our and others’ children.