Self Defense or Ethnoviolence?

Since the night of February 26th 2012, thousands of people in our country have been in a deep state of unrest.

On that Sunday night, Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by Zimmerman, a security patrolman on duty in a Sanford, Florida neighborhood. While rumors, allegations, and suspicions continue to fly in the wake of the terrible incident, the question is whether or not Treyvon was killed out of self defense or because of a racial profile that Zimmerman felt threatened by. Treyvon's family claims that this was a definite act of racism both in the act of shooting and in the lack of prosecution. Family members (and thousands of others) believe that Treyvon was killed because the patrolman felt threatened by his race, and that had Treyvon been a caucasian, Zimmerman would have been prosecuted for the shooting.

While we cannot draw conclusions on the definite motive of Zimmerman, this incident sheds light on very real possibility of ethnoviolence. Though the prevalence of discrimination and prejudice has been drastically decreasing since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, dozens of psychological studies tell us that racial profiling is a very real phenomenon.

Further comments on the Trayvon Martin case are pending on the investigation. For now, read more about police and racial profiling here: http://www.international.ucla.edu/cms/files/antonovics_knight.pdf