Commentary: Case is not about Trayvon Martin’s hoodie by Leonard Pitts Jr. in The Miami Herald does an excellent job of clarifying the issue.

This, then, is what killed Trayvon Martin, the fact that we are so stubbornly convinced of that redundancy that a boy walking home carrying nothing more threatening than Skittles and iced tea can become a source of terror sufficient for a George Zimmerman to stalk him and to kill him.

It doesn’t matter if he wore a hoodie.

It doesn’t matter if he punched Zimmerman.

It doesn’t matter why he was suspended from school.

What matters is that he is unavailable for comment about those things, and always will be. What matters is that none of them changes the essential truth of what this is about.

Though innocent of any crime, Trayvon Martin was gunned down by George Zimmerman. He was sacrificed for all our fears.

When people are armed with lethal weapons and they have stereotypical assumptions about the motives of a certain class of people that they meet, then it is almost inevitable that a situation like this one will occur.  What can we do to lessen the chance that the people who are subject of this type of stereotyping will be needlessly put in danger, and what can we do to lessen the chances that people who hold these stereotypical beliefs will end up taking actions that they will regret for the rest of their lives?