Thursday, May 17, 2012

Pictures of Trayvon Martin as a Teenager

Most of the stuff that I post on this blog is designed to be lighthearted in nature and to make people laugh. However, every once in a while, I decide to post something a little more serious. This is one of those posts.

Let me start out by saying that the situation with the shooting involving Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman is a complex one. Obviously, Zimmerman should not have followed Martin. Obviously, Zimmerman following Martin didn't give Martin the right to start beating Zimmerman. For many reasons, this is just one situation where I am willing to reserve judgement until more information comes to light.

However, that said, I am willing to address media bias on one factor. See, for some reason, every picture of Trayvon Martin that seems to come across the AP makes it look like he was 10 years old. He wasn't. At the time of the shooting, he was already a very large and imposing teenager.

So, I thought that I would post a picture of him as exactly that: a teenager. Here is the first picture I found from a Google Image Search. Apparently, this is from his Facebook page.

Picture of Trayvon Martin from Facebook

This is a second picture, this time of him in a football uniform.



I don't know if either of these pictures are fake. I have no way of knowing that. However, I wanted to post them anyway for two reasons.

First, I think that the media posting pictures of Martin as an adolescent is disrespectful to Zimmerman. Martin was not a teenager at the time of the shooting. Period. Although there is no way to prove it one way or the other, I really feel that the media's constant portrayal of Martin using the famous adolescent picture is meant to bias the public.

Second, I also strangely think that the media is being disrespectful to Martin. Underneath the surface, it's almost as if they're implying that the only way that a black male can be a sympathetic character is to show pictures of that person as an adolescent. I think that this is simply not the case, and I wanted to help the media correct this problem.

What are your thoughts on the Martin -- Zimmerman debacle?

Enhanced by Zemanta

LinkWithin

Related Posts with Thumbnails
comments powered by Disqus