News about Trayvon Martin and his senseless death in Florida has been boiling across the country this past week. I have been caught up in hearing any little bit of news I can hear about it. I had heard about the story early last week, but it wasn't until I saw the parents first appear on the Today Show, and I heard the emotions in his parents voices, did I become moved with the case. It seemed overnight the story became interesting to the press and once the first 911 tapes were released, that opened the floodgates.

Do you remember around the first months of the Obama Administration, there was an incident where Henry Lewis Gates, a black professor from Harvard was arrested by the police when he returned to his own home. There was a 911 call made about someone breaking into his house and indeed, he had left his keys in his house and did go through a back entrance to get in. This was the first little dust up of race relations for the Administration. Granted, it didn't happen in Washington and frankly didn't involved the President until he made what many would have considered a reasonable comment, if he wasn't a black President. Because Obama is black and the first black President, everything he says paints a broader picture than what is deserved in a lot of cases.

The Trayvon Martin case hit a tipping point this week, which was very similar to the one that occurred with Henry Louis Gates. Trayvon became a symbol of why race relations in the United States are not a clean cut as we would like them to be. First of all, listening just to the liberal stations this week, I have heard callers call in claiming the gun law shouldn't be changed, that the gunman really might have been in fear of his life because Trayvon was a stranger in the area, and why are all the black people bringing up race in everything. Just this morning I heard callers complain, again this is on LIBERAL radio shows, that Al Sharpton is an opportunist because he is going down to a march tonight and isn't going to take care of arrangements because his mother died hours earlier, another woman complained that in the 911 call the dispatcher didn't ask if the stranger (Trayvon) was Asian, which she felt was racist against Asians, and another was outraged that 'no one in the media' would say that the shooter was Hispanic, thus not white and didn't fit into the scenario 'everyone' was trying to put on the case, which was this was a racist man. In his world, Hispanics can't be racist.

Let me make this incredibly clear, the examples I've given, and there are a lot I could give, have been from LIBERAL outlets. While I haven't listened to the conservative side, if there had been any discussion on the event I'm sure there would have been mention of it. What has been very disturbing has been the silence from Presidential candidates. There was footage of Mitt Romney being asked about the event while working a glad hand line, and it is very clear that the reporter asked the question loud enough for Romney to hear, and he ignored it. Fox News has had very little about it on their website. In fact, most of the time when I have gone to the site I have had to go to their US tab to see anything about Trayvon. Only today (which I talked about in a previous article) did I see anything about Treyvon on their homepage. Like I said, I have to assume Rush and the other national right wing talk show host haven't said anything about the issue because if they had liberal media would have pointed it out.

We really want to believe things have changed in America regarding race. We have convinced ourselves with the election of Obama we are in a post-racial world. When Henry Louis Gates was arrested at his home and the President commented on this, right wing talk radio was quick to say he was pandering on the issue because he was black. Years later, when a black kid is shot, some people wonder why it happened and others want to ignore the obvious. Race relations isn't something that will disappear overnight. It's not something we can continue to ignore. We don't have to think about every racial issue as a battle, not every racial issue will be as tragic as Trayvon Martin, but we have to stop lying to ourselves, and to our children, that race is something that is over in America. I know we say we know there are still racial issues in America but I believe we address it like someone saying 'How are you?' We give the pat answer but we don't really try to face racism head on. We try to think of racism as something that happens in 'that' part of America. Unfortunately, the death of Trayvon is showing us racism can show up anywhere and we can't ignore it.