Is it Just Black and White? A Summary of the Trayvon Martin Case

On February 26, 2012 in Sanford, Florida, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed by 28-year-old George Zimmerman. This unleashed a lot of the tension that has been built up for years between both the black and white communities. The Martin family as well as various Civil Rights groups (including the NAACP) wanted to see Zimmerman found guilty, claiming that the shooting was racially motivated, Trayvon being African American and Zimmerman being white (later classified as white Hispanic), especially after the police dispatcher told Zimmerman not to follow Trayvon or approach him, and he did anyway. The Zimmerman defense wanted to be found not guilty, claiming that Trayvon was the aggressor in the conflict and Zimmerman acted in self defense. In the end, the verdict of the case was not guilty. This caused a lot of reactions, some even violent, all over the nation. There were stories of young African American men attacking their white counterparts while shouting “This is for Trayvon”, as well as the stories of police officers gunning down young black men. A group of young organizers named the Dream Defenders staged a sit-in in the Florida Capitol Building demanding a special session with legislatures to pass the Trayvon Martin Law, which repealed Stand Your Ground, a law that is already controversial because it seems to not work in the defense for people of color , ban racial profiling, and put and end to the School-to-Prison Pipline, keeping young people in schools and out of prison or dead. For a little over a month, and joined by various Civil Rights leaders and members, such as Harry Belafonte, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Talib Kweli, they led rallies and protests and even slept outside of Governor Rick Scott’s office. As stated earlier, this case has brought out a lot of the built up tension between the two communities and has seem to push them further away, keeping the racial gap between them open.

References

Shooting of Trayvon Martin, (n.d.). Wikipedia Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Trayvon_Martin

Dream Defenders, (n.d.). http://dreamdefenders.org/

Google Email Advertisements vs. Advocacy Groups

Advocacy Groups are attacking Google because Google uses information from its user’s emails to direct specific ads to specific users. Advocacy Groups want Google to stop violating the privacy of its users in order to direct advertisements. Google only wants people to understand that this practice of using email information to direct advertisements has been in place since Gmail’s creation in 2004. Despite various court cases since 2004, in which Gmail users have accused Google of invasion of privacy, Google continues to scan its user’s emails in order to direct ads that it deems appropriate and interesting for each user. Google argues that computers, not humans scan emails for keywords and that scanning for keywords is not the same as reading the content of emails. Also Google’s lawyers argue that all email providers process emails in similar ways that Google does (Healey 2013). Still despite all of the many failed court cases, advocacy groups still are making accusations.

References:

Healey, J. (2013, August 15). Privacy advocates attack Gmail – again- for email scanning. The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from http://articles.latimes.com/2013/aug/15/news/la-ol-google-gmail-privacy-reasonable-expectation-20130814