With that personal diatribe out of the way, I wanted to add an article I read a couple weeks ago that this discussion reminded me of. A NYT op-ed by Rich Benjamin, The Gated Community Mentality, talks about the Zimmerman case in terms not only of race, but also class, age, property ownership, etc. As an outsider in a gated community, according to this piece, Trayvon Martin was in danger owing to a confluence of many factors, race being one. "Residents’ palpable satisfaction with their communities’ virtue and their evident readiness to trumpet alarm at any given “threat” create a peculiar atmosphere — an unholy alliance of smugness and insecurity. In this us-versus-them mental landscape, them refers to new immigrants, blacks, young people, renters, non-property-owners and people perceived to be poor."

If you read the whole article, you may find Benjamin's mathematics to be problematic, and some of his conclusions to be ill-evidenced (how did Zimmerman know Martin wasn't a resident in such a big community? were there no other children in the community?), but there's something to be said for expanding the dialogue to merely a white vs. black one. Certainly racism was a problem, but perhaps not the only one. The full article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/opinion/the-gated-community-mentality.html?_r=2.