I think the following is absolutely spot-on:
White people don’t think Zimmerman is white. He looks mostly Mexican. But for the purposes of race warfare he will come in handy as a kind of intermediate between “real” white people and blacks. That way white people can keep their white hands clean and comfort themselves that people they think of as goons are doing their dirty work for them.
Mexicans have got to reject this role of “enforcer” for The Man.
The efforts to co-opt Hispanic people for the lousiest, shittiest, vilest causes in this country should stop.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’m white and I actually consider Zimmerman to be white. His last name isn’t Hispanic and to me he looks “white.” I don’t know much about him. If he claims a Hispanic identity then that’s his identity. But to me, he looks like a white man with brown eyes.
Regardless of the racial identity he claims, his acquittal still shows how problematic race relations are in this country. If Martin was white (or even more so if he was a white blonde girl) I’m sure Zimmerman would have been prosecuted.
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// or even more so if he was a white blonde girl
Reminded of:
I’m a white woman, and if a man chased me down and shot me dead, a few scratches on his face would probably be seen as evidence that he was really determined to hurt or kill me, not that he was acting in “self-defense”.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/16/there-needs-to-be-a-third-choice-besides-death-or-illegal-restraint-by-a-madman/
“So, black men are told that they can’t so much as lift a finger to defend themselves or else it’s totally justified to shoot them dead, and white women are told that we have to fight back to the utmost resistance because anything that even smells the tiniest bit like submitting to coercion is proof that we’re trollops who were asking for it.”
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I really don’t give a crap about Zimmerman’s “race” or ethnicity. The point is that this was a tragedy in every sense of the word no matter how you look at it and that there are still a lot of racial issues in this country that need to be dealt with. He could have been Black or Asian for I care and I would have still thought the same way.
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I don’t understand the denial of Zimmerman’s Mexican looks. Latinos need to take a stand and refuse to become an intermediate goon squad between whites and blacks. There is a lot of theory about this in Friere and others.
It’s faux naive to say that Zimmerman is just a regular white guy.
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“I don’t understand the denial of Zimmerman’s Mexican looks.”
I guess I honestly didn’t realize he was Hispanic until that fact received media attention. To me, he really “looked white.” There are a great deal of Americans with his coloring who ID as white (Greeks and Italians spring to mind.) Regardless of Zimmerman’s race, I still contend that the jury would have made a different decision if the victim was not a young black male.
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“I guess I honestly didn’t realize he was Hispanic until that fact received media attention. ”
– I’m sure you didn’t because you are not a racist and you would not be giving out a not-guilty verdict if you sat on that jury.
Unfortunately, there are still too many racists in the world.
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The same people who call Zimmerman white are complaining that he was found not guilty by an “all-white” jury, erasing the Latina juror.
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That’s why I like my own little nation state, it’s virtually never a problem.
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Zimmerman’s mother is Peruvian, but this does not change the argument. We are moving toward a Latin-American style racist hierarchy instead of the Black/White system in place during the Civil Rights era.
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I agree with you, Hattie. There are troubling signs that certain ultra-Conservative circles want to use the growing Hispanic population for the purposes you name. Racism is extremely high within Hispanic communities and minute gradations of racial prestige based on shades of skin color are very present. And this tragic reality is very easy for the US racists to exploit. If we don’t want to lose the achievements of the Civil Rights era.
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Peru is one of the mpst racist LatAm societies, by the way. I love Peru, but we have to be honest here.
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Now how abouts if people could measure the merits of an action on the basis of something other than identity. I don’t mean that identity should be removed from the equation, because one could well decide to measure the demerits of an action on the basis that somebody placed meaning on identity when he ought not to have done.
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Let me quote Brian Aldiss: We are all symbols to each other, but we are people too.
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In murder cases it is often the race of the victim that determines the outcome at trial, not the race of the perpetrator. Black victims are not considered as valuable people as white ones, unless they are cops.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/16/george-zimmerman_n_1676729.html
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“Hispanic” covers a wide range of physical appearances, and unless someone has a very classic Mayan or other indigenous appearance, I won’t have a clue about the person’s identity until he or she tells me. Of course, I live in the Midwest, land of the clueless.
Of course the conservatives in this country are willing to make pets of conservative Latin Americans who fulfill US conservative wishes – Efraim Rios Montt, the bloody-handed dictator and pious conservative evangelical Protestant hero to the US Religious Right? Otherwise, “Hispanics” are just votes, not individuals with individual interests, to the political Right.
Concerning race and “stand your ground” rules, see this article with actual data: http://blog.metrotrends.org/2013/06/stand-ground-laws-racial-bias/
Concerning Brazil’s history of slavery, a movie about 18th century escaped slave colony: Quilombo (a review, http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/etext/llilas/ilassa/2007/canto.pdf) – I found the movie in the St. Louis Public Library.
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