Those are the words of lawyer David Cohn, referring to the case of David Sal Silva, a 33-year-old father of four who died in custody last Wednesday after an alleged confrontation with Kern County and California Highway Patrol officers in Bakersfield, California. Cohn is representing the Silva family and his reference to King is not an exaggeration. Something horrific happened last week in Bakersfield, and it is a tale of cellphone videos, possible police coverup, an FBI investigation, and a silent outrage that has begun to hit the national media (CNN, New York Times, HuffPost), but is nowhere near the level of the King beating or the Trayvon Martin case, even though the Silva case so far has more public footage of the incident than those two famous stories.

Yet where is the national outrage? Where are the tweets and the hashtags and the calls for justice? Where are the cameras descending onto Bakersfield with 24/7 coverage? Is the mainstream media more consumed by Washington issues and Cleveland kidnapping stories? Apparently.

The Silva case should shake this nation to the core. Yet we stay silent. Perhaps these details will convince you: There were reports that Silva was struck “more than a dozen times” by police batons, that witnesses took videos of the incidents, videos that were seized by Bakersfield police hours after the incident. Silva died in custody. Witnesses have already gone on record to question the police’s story that Silva was intoxicated and struggling with police. There are even claims that one of the cellphone videos has already been erased by police though there is no proof that one of the cellphone videos confiscated by police is missing.  The Kern County Sheriff has had to bring in the FBI to investigate. The cellphone videos are now being analyzed by the FBI. And Silva’s family, through Cohn, are raising serious questions as to how the entire matter has been handled.

Do you need to hear the chilling 911 call? Here it is.

Do you have to watch the grainy security video obtained by The Los Angeles Times of shadowy figures allegedly beating someone?

One local report from Bakersfield this week provides even more details:

“He had some kind of a problem with the wife, left the house, talked to his mom and said he was going for help at the hospital,” said Ralph Silva, David Silva’s uncle.

David Silva’s uncle said no one knows what happened next. 17 News obtained security video from a home, that appears to show a violent encounter between deputies and Silva, near the hospital.

Deputies said Silva was intoxicated and confrontational. “Maybe he’s trying to defend himself from someone trying to grab him. It doesn’t call for a death,” said Silva.

Let’s say that Silva was drunk. Does it merit his death? How threatening can a drunk person be in front of nine officers with batons?

As Laura Vazquez, a witness to the scene, told the The New York Times:

She said that sheriff’s deputies told Mr. Silva to stay on the ground. When he tried to get up, she said, deputies ran up and hit him in the head with their clubs. Soon, she said, he was crying for help as at least eight officers hit him, kicked him and pressed their knees into his chest and stomach.

“For the first couple minutes he was screaming for help, basically pleading for his life,” said Ms. Vasquez, 26. “Then we couldn’t see him anymore. That’s how many cops were on top of him.”

Then there is this telling quote from Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood, who finally put the six Kern County officers on paid leave after claiming that their lives were being threatened, about the one cellphone video now with the FBI: “I have seen the video. I cannot speculate whether [the officers] acted appropriately or not just by looking at the video. Baton strikes were used but what I don’t know is how many and where they were on the body and if they caused significant injury that caused death.”

So where is the outrage? Is it because Silva’s parents are not sharing their thoughts publicly to the media and instead are having Cohn speak for them? Is the mainstream media being distracted by other stories? And where are the national Latino organizations like MALDEF and NCLR on this?

Last week in Bakersfield, a Latino father died in custody at the hands of police.

The community needs to wake up and demand that justice is served. We owe it to the memory of David Silva. We owe it to his family.

Julio Ricardo Varela (@julito77 ) founded LatinoRebels.com in May, 2011 and proceeded to open it up to about 20 like-minded Rebeldes. His personal blog, juliorvarela.com, has been active since 2008 and is widely read in Puerto Rico and beyond. In the past 12 months, Julito represented the Rebeldes on Face the Nation, NPR, Univision, Forbes, and The New York Times.

“Fasten your seat belt,” he told his audience. “I am and have been in touch with some people in the Republican Party in New Jersey. I am truly contemplating running for Senate against Frank Lautenberg or Cory Booker in New Jersey.”

“I figure, at my age, if I’m going to do it, I’ve got to do it,” Rivera added.

RELATED: Firestorm as Geraldo Rivera says Trayvon Martin’s hoodie responsible for his death

Rivera also announced that he would seek to add nationalizing New York City’s controversial “stop and frisk” police practice to his platform should he run.

“The way you beat the whole racial profiling problem, you make it specific precinct statistics,” he said. “You can even make it block by block statistics if you want. You can have some objective criteria to beat the racial profiling constitutional problem and I’m telling you Chicago and Philly and the other cities can do what New York did dramatically cutting homicides.”

Rivera was talking to his audience and Fox News contributor Judge Andrew Napolitano, who praised Rivera, and said he would do everything in his power to help him win the seat because Geraldo is “a rare understander of the nature of human freedom and the role of government in our lives,” he said, adding, “I welcome this as a great gift at this stage in my life.”

Rivera’s eventual opponent would have plenty of sound bites to use against Rivera, who has come under fire for controversial comments. After the shooting death of Trayvon Martin he said the hoodie the teen was wearing caused him to be shot by George Zimmerman.

“I am urging the parents of black and Latino youngsters, particularly, to not let their children go out wearing hoodies,” Rivera said. “I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was.”

His hoodie killed Trayvon Martin as surely as George Zimmerman.—
Geraldo Rivera (@GeraldoRivera) March 23, 2012

Whatever New Jersey voters think of the possibility of “Senator Geraldo Rivera,” they will find out soon if it will be a possibility. Rivera says he has no interest in drawing it out and will make his decision soon.

RELATED: Geraldo Rivera wonders if “lesbian cabal” is running the Department of Homeland Security

Serino became a central figure in the case when evidence showed he had filed an arrest affidavit a few weeks after the shooting of Trayvon Martin, even though his chief felt there was not enough evidence to charge Zimmerman.

The former Sanford police major-crimes investigator, became a controversial figure when evidence revealed he had quietly filed an arrest affidavit a few weeks after the shooting death of Miami Gardens teenager Trayvon Martin, even as his chief publicly said there wasn’t enough evidence to make a case. In an FBI report, Serino told agents he was pressured to file charges by African-American colleagues in the department.

While Serino did not speak to The Miami Herald, a spokesman for Baez confirmed he had been hired to look out for his interests in the case and stated he is not planning to file a lawsuit.

“He wants his own counsel — he’s intimidated. It might not be a friendly deposition,” said Baez spokesman Michael Wright to The Miami Herald.

Baez is famous nationwide for representing Casey Anthony, a Florida mother charged with killing her child in 2008 after her disappearance, and who was later acquitted.

Fifteen-year department veteran Serino is scheduled, like many others, to give his sworn testimony to prosecutors and Zimmerman’s defense team.

Tape-recorded interviews show Serino was skeptical of Zimmerman from the start and even grilled him with inconsistencies in his story days later.

The boy in this case is an 8th grade basketball player who also plays first chair viola at school.

His mom says he’s a good kid who snuck out of a friend’s house early Saturday morning, but wasn’t up to trouble.

“I was at my friend’s home and I was walking to my friend’s home,” said the boy in an exclusive interview with NBC affiliate KOB Eyewitness News 4.

“And on the way there we were just running around just playing and just hiding from each other and I hid under a truck.”

The moments that followed could have cost the boy his life.

A criminal complaint states the homeowner, Michael Zamora, heard noises and went outside with a gun, thinking someone was stealing his truck.

It had recently been stolen and recovered.

“He told me to get the f’ on the ground so I put my hands up and I got on my knees. And then he grabbed me by the back of my shirt,” said the boy.

The 42-year-old claims the boy punched him in the face.

The boy told police Zamora dragged him into his garage and zip-tied his wrists.

“My heart just dropped and I didn’t know what was going to happen,” said the boy.

Zamora then took the 5’2″ 90-lb. boy inside his house until police arrived, according to court documents.

When police found the boy they realized he had been shot in the shoulder.

When police asked Zamora about it, he first told them that he had the gun when it fell and went off.

He then clarified his story to police, saying he had the gun in his hand the whole time and then it went off by accident.

When asked if he meant to shoot the boy, Zamora replied, “no, I didn’t!  It was 3 o’clock in the morning. There’s a kid messing around with my truck, what do you expect? You know?”

“I’ve never been so scared in my life,” said the boy’s mother, Alysha Colbert. “I could’ve lost my son,” she said. “If he would have turned around and took off running would he have shot him in the back, because he was black?”

Zamora allegedly told police, “I saw the guy right there, it was dark, he was black, I didn’t know what to expect.”

“Trayvon Martin. That’s the first thing that popped into my mind was Trayvon Martin,” said Colbert.

To that, Zamora responded: “That’s ridiculous. I was just protecting my property and my family you know. That’s all I can do. I think any other red-blooded American would have done the same thing.”

The boy is now in a sling, recovering from the gunshot wound.

His mom says she’s going to fight for justice.

The boy was staying at a friend’s house and snuck out to walk two girl friends home.

The boy’s mother had no knowledge of this because she was at her house.

“I don’t care what time of night he was out, he didn’t deserve this. No kid deserves anything like this,” she said.

After police heard from both Zamora and the boy, they decided Zamora was in the wrong.

He’s now charged with false imprisonment and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon.

“I regret everything,” said Zamora. “I wish it had not happened but it did. It’s unfortunate.”

The boy’s mom says he’s not charged with anything.

“I think that he should be in jail right now,” said the boy. “I don’t see how he thought I was a man because I’m not really that big.”

The man who claims he killed African-American teenager Trayvon Martin in self-defense, sparking a national uproar, is facing allegations that he molested a close family relative when she was a child, according to TheGrio. Now a statement he made is sure to undergo scrutiny by the prosecution as well.

“I think that honestly all of this could’ve been avoided if my parents would’ve given me a proper Hispanic/Latino name,” Zimmerman says to a family member on a jailhouse phone, according to transcripts released on Monday.

Zimmerman then says a name like “Jorge” rather than George, would have helped him out.

“But you have the most American name in the world,” the female tells him.

Then he adds sarcastically that his family “should’ve named me George Herbert Walker,” alluding to former president George H.W. Bush.

Zimmerman also takes issue with a media description of him as a “white Hispanic.”

“Honestly, they’re gonna give me a complex,” he says. “Every time I see my photo I say, ‘What’s a white Hispanic?’”

Zimmerman’s problems will only intensify after the revelation that he molested a family member, known as “witness 9.”

For the latest on that story and more, go to TheGrio.com for full coverage of Trayvon Martin and the George Zimmerman case.

Is it any wonder that the new Occupy-anything-you-can-think-of ethos has made its way into public school classrooms?

Last week, Brooke Harris, an English and journalism teacher at a Pontiac, Mich., charter school, said she’d been wrongly fired for encouraging her students to organize a fundraiser for Trayvon Martin, the hoodie-wearing Florida teen who was shot while making his way home from a convenience store.

Harris told The Detroit Free Press that her students wanted to donate to the Martin family the proceeds from a day when students would pay to wear hoodies to school, with the hoods covering their heads, in order to show solidarity with the slain teen.

She had gotten permission for the fundraiser from her principal but the superintendent, Jacqueline Cassell, forbade Harris from moving forward because students flouting the no-head-coverings policy would disrupt the entire school. Cassell told the Free Press that though she objected to the fundraiser, “I certainly would not use this issue as a reason to terminate anybody.”

But Harris claims this is exactly what happened. “I was told I was a bad teacher, that I was being unprofessional,” Harris said, “that I’m being paid to teach, not to be an activist.”

OK. Raise your hand if you believe wholeheartedly that public school teachers are employed by taxpayers to educate students in the academic subjects required for high school graduation — and not to feed students their personal political or social-issue opinions and encourage protests.

The problem is that it can be tough to spot a difference between a teacher who appropriately supports student efforts to exercise citizenship responsibilities taught in civics classes from one who serves as the impetus for an act of advocacy.

And it’s not like teacher preparation programs routinely train new educators on how to teach critical thinking by addressing controversial current events and other touchy topics relevant to academic subject matter, with unbiased facts that present all sides of an argument. Such guidance usually isn’t a staple of teacher orientation at schools, either.

Given that, for the most part, teachers mold young minds behind closed doors, you have to wonder how any lesson can be slanted when presented by an activist teacher who feels it is part of his or her mission as an educator to pass their politics on to students.

Yes, I said “activist” teachers. They believe that part of their job involves teaching students about the injustices of the world and how to challenge them — which is fine, I suppose, if you happen to see eye-to-eye and heart-to-heart with a teacher’s social and political beliefs.

Go ahead, residents of New York City, Milwaukee, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and Atlanta, check out www.teacheractivistgroups.org and learn the missions of organizations such as “Teachers 4 Social Justice,” “The Education for Liberation Network,” and the “Collective of Radical Educators.” All perfectly lovely organizations, I’m sure, if you don’t mind a little anarchy with your algebra.

I called Kyle Olson, the founder of the reform organization Education Action Group, which routinely details examples of teachers who preach pro-union, anti-establishment political beliefs in their classrooms, and the author of “Indoctrination: How ‘Useful Idiots’ Are Using Our Schools to Subvert American Exceptionalism.” He offered an effective, nonpartisan tip for how all parents can navigate school situations that sometimes send kids home saying the darnedest things.

“Parents need to be engaged in the learning process,” Olson said. “They need to ask their kids: ‘What happened at school today?’ ‘What’s your homework?’ ‘What videos did you watch today?’ If you’re concerned, you need to find out more — nothing will change until parents complain.”

That works for teachers as well. Protesters are demanding Harris’ reinstatement and have staged a rally for her. If she wasn’t out of line and was wrongly terminated for merely enabling her pupils to support a cause that they believed in, her students’ families are correct to exercise their right to complain online and on the streets to anyone who will listen. Advocacy for your children is a lesson more parents need to put into practice.

Esther J. Cepeda is syndicated columnist and an NBC Latino Contributor.

You can reach her at estherjcepeda@washpost.com. 

(c) 2012, Washington Post Writers Group

Angela B. Corey, Special Prosecutor for the State of Florida, announced that Zimmerman has been charged with second-degree murder.  This carries a minimum penalty of 25 years in prison and a maximum of life. The prosecution was wise to go with the second-degree charge.

So much of the public anger over Martin’s death has been because a neighborhood watchman killed an unarmed teenager and was not so much as arrested.  Corey’s opting for the highest charge reflects sound legal strategy as well as sensitivity to the larger implications of this case.

In Florida, a first-degree murder charge requires a finding of premeditation, which no one is maintaining applies here.  A second-degree charge requires a finding that death was caused by a criminal act showing “a depraved mind without regard for human life.”  In other words, the state of Florida must prove that Zimmerman deliberately went after Martin, instead of shooting him in self-defense.

Aiming for the toughest possible charge is the mark of a confident prosecutor.  Corey is signaling that she fully believes in her case (She can still opt for a lesser charge later).  The possibility of a life in prison will no doubt put pressure on Zimmerman, age 28, to accept a plea deal of guilty in exchange for a lighter sentence.

Corey is smart to go for the maximum charge because there is a federal civil rights probe in the works as well.  It would be a black eye for the state of Florida if Zimmerman were to get off, especially on a lesser charge, while the Department of Justice aggressively pursued their own case.  The second-degree charge shows that the State of Florida is serious about finding out what happened that night in Sanford.

The wild card in this equation is Florida’s Stand Your Ground law.  It accords the benefit of the doubt to people who use deadly force to protect themselves, even if they are not in their own home.  If a judge finds that Zimmerman acted within his rights under this law, the case could be over without ever reaching a jury.

But the Stand Your Ground defense will be troublesome for Zimmerman.  Consider his actions on February 26. He called a 911 operator and reported seeing a suspicious person (Martin).  The operator told him to remain in his car and not to follow Martin; Zimmerman did exactly the opposite.  Even the author of this law, Florida State Representative Dennis Baxley (R) has stated that Zimmerman is not covered by its provisions.  “There is no protection in the Stand Your Ground Law for anyone who pursues and confronts people,” he told Fox News. Nor was the law ever intended to be justification for vigilantism.

It may be a long while before we know the facts surrounding Martin’s killing.  It is going to be an arduous task to find an unbiased jury.  But I applaud the fearlessness of prosecutor Corey in charging Zimmerman with second-degree murder.  She rightly recognizes what is at stake here: our core values of equal protection and justice for all.

Raul A. Reyes is an attorney and member of the USA Today Board of Contributors

Martin, 17, black, and African-American, was fatally shot Feb. 26th, as he walked with candy and iced-tea in his pocket from a convenience store to his father’s fianceé’s home in a gated community in Sanford.

The shooter, 28-year-old George Zimmerman, a man who “appears” white and whose father and mother have Jewish and Latino roots, respectively, has been neither arrested nor charged in the homicide. Supporters of Martin’s family have aggressively pushed for Zimmerman to be arrested and criminally charged, since Martin was unarmed and some say Zimmerman initiated aggression between the two by apparently disregarded a 911 dispatcher’s caution to stop following Martin.

In the resulting furor, TV and radio pundits have speculated that what was an already strained relationship between African-Americans and some Latinos in Martin’s South Florida region will only get worse as lines are drawn between support for criminal charges and defense of Zimmerman.

There is no doubt there are tensions on a hyper-local level. The New York Times reported last weekend of tensions between African-Americans and Latinos in Durham, North Carolina, where Latinos acknowledge harboring greater negative feelings toward African American neighbors than the other way around.

The Times report generally supports a 2008 Pew Center study that revealed African Americans don’t feel as negatively toward Latinos as Latinos do about them, though large percentages of both groups acknowledge that there is systemic discrimination both sides face.

But one major problem with the current punditry is that history disputes the notion that there is some grand tradition of bitterness between African-Americans and Latinos.

“While you will find those issues on a neighborhood level, like we read about in the Times, on a broader level, a political level, what you’ll find is a history of parallel civil rights fights,” says historian Julie Weise, a professor at the University of California – Long Beach.

“Look at the African-American civil rights movement in the 1960s and the Chicano Movement that started a short time later. It obviously followed and learned from the [black] civil rights movement.”

Both Tom Bradley, the first African-American mayor of Los Angeles, and Henry Cisneros, the Latino former mayor of San Antonio, Texas, won their respective offices thanks to broad African American and Latino voter coalitions, Weise says.

Perhaps even worse than the idea that African-Americans and Latinos are on the verge of war in the U.S. over the apparent mishandling of the initial Trayvon Martin investigation is that most of the punditry exposes a shocking lack of knowledge about race and ethnicity, as prescribed by widely accepted science.

Why describe Martin as black and African-American? Because black very loosely describes his appearance, while African-American defines his ethnic heritage. If you doubt as much try telling white immigrant from South Africa that African-American is an exclusively black definition. As for Zimmerman, sure, his skin’s fair. His hair is straight. By all practical descriptions, he’s white. That doesn’t change the fact that he’s also ethnically part Latino.

While these are distinctions that all of us should have learned in a basic high school world history or geography class, it’s important to reiterate them here, as pundits continue to talk about Zimmerman as though he could only be white or only Latino, but not both.

So if the very clear difference between race and ethnicity is lost on the professional talking heads, how can they be expected to properly gauge the relationship between African and Latino Americans?

However the Martin/Zimmerman case turns out, what’s at stake is more than legal justice for Martin’s family. It is a cultural relationship that in modern times dates back 50 years, when the late Cesar Chavez launched the National Farm Workers Association (later known as United Farm Workers) in an effort to secure civil rights and better working conditions for Latino farm workers in the U.S.

Chavez’s organization paralleled the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., and served as the second blow of a one-two punch against what was then a long history of institutional civil rights violations in the U.S.

Three years before his death in 1993, Chavez, in an interview, praised the blueprint, King drew for securing justice credibly. “He learned how to successfully fight hatred and violence with his unstoppable power of nonviolence” Chavez said of King.

Tensions on the neighborhood level? Those can be worked out be people humbling themselves and getting to know their neighbors. But on the national level? Pundits would be wise to stop shouting fire, or fuego, in the crowded theater of public opinion.

Follow @Jamesburnett on Twitter.

This is one wild misconception. Racism comes in all shapes and sizes. It also comes in all races.

How can anyone be exempt from racism simply because they are a minority? This stereotype is right along the lines of anyone thinking that Latinos can’t have blond hair and blue eyes. But the George Zimmerman misconception sets a dangerous precedent because it means that people like him could potentially get away with murder simply because of a general belief that only white people can be racists.

In the Hispanic population there has been a long history of racism dating back to our countries of origin. The Spanish and the Portuguese that settled in Latin America also brought with them African slaves and also exterminated many native cultures, just like in the British and the French did in the United States. We also freed our slaves and for a long time we also continued to treat them as fourth class citizens. Latin American countries have struggled to socially, politically and economically integrate races.

In the Spanish speaking Caribbean you would be hard pressed to find anyone who actually considers herself or himself black. It’s just not proper to be black. We have everything from white to “indio”, “mestizo”, “triqueño”, dark skinned, “mulato”…anything but black or “negro”.  In fact, many people even try to give it a diminutive term like “negrita” or “negrito” like if the sweeter sounding word  will indirectly excuse the person for being what they are…black.

Racism among Hispanics in the US is not openly denounced or called out for what it is. It’s our dirty little secret. It seems that we are uptight when racism is directed towards us as a group, and yet, individual groups of Hispanics don’t think twice about making racist jokes, especially in tight knit communities.  Racism is just as engrained in our culture as it is in any other.  Many of us have moved forward and acknowledged racism in our culture, but it still exists.

Growing up in a tight-knit traditional Cuban family I know firsthand about racism. To my grandfather, blacks were personas non-grata. We even encountered a failed “smash and grab” in Miami by a group of black kids 20 years ago and in that instance my grandmother only kept screaming in the car “kill the n*” . When we had lunch at a restaurant the next day, he told the story to the young waiter who replied that he was a hero and that he should’ve killed the “m…f…n…”. This same kind of attitude may be the same one that Zimmerman had when he pulled that trigger.

I don’t know if George Zimmerman was committing a hate crime, being negligent or simply defending himself when he confronted Martin. But we are doing a disservice to justice when we automatically assume that simply because of his race, Zimmerman is innocent of murder.

Mari Tere Molinet is Puerto Rican of Cuban descent. She is a media professional, professor, blogger and aspiring entrepreneur. She is co-founder of the start-up FamilyClick.com the online, digital family-room where kids video-chat with family while doing fun activities like reading, drawing, and watching videos.

As a forty-year old professor who studies Latino politics, this angers me.  As a father of a 2-year old boy, it makes me afraid.  Our judicial system is set up with maximum empathy built into it for the majority.  Law enforcement operates under an assumption of suspicion of minorities and it matters little if the officers themselves are minority.

We have managed to institutionalize mechanisms that force understanding into the system through hard fought laws that mandates certain types of behavior, for instance, in our school system via desegregation and preferential treatment in the admissions process in our universities.

The federal government has also imposed policies that seek to protect minorities, such as hate crimes, but they are under constant attack because they are viewed as special privileges. The Voting Rights Act, which creates federal authority over a States’ ability to conduct their electoral procedures as they wish, is the result of a long pattern of aggression by States against the rights of minorities to participate in the basic functions of democracy.

And so when I see the reaction over the Trayvon Martin killing, I too feel the outrage.  Coming from Los Angeles, this is a regular occurrence.  I cannot give Trayvon’s death much more than I can give when I read about the hundreds of other minority teens that are gunned down in cold blood every year in my hometown.  I feel guilty for admitting that, but it’s the truth.

Instead, my outrage comes from the insistence by folks who should know better, to set the scenario of Trayvon’s killing in the most forgiving light possible for George Zimmerman.  Trayvon was wearing a hoodie.  Pictures of him have popped up dressed as a wannabe gangbanger.  Black kids are more likely to kill other black kids, say the message boards.  Look there, a black kid just attacked a white kid and nobody seems to care, says a friend on Facebook.

Debbie Riddle, a Texas legislator who once slept inside the Statehouse in order to be the first to submit her own SB1070-style bill so that it would have the lowest bill number on it as a symbol of the importance of immigrant control, wrote on her Facebook wall, “Will someone please tell our kids that if you dress like a gangster you may be treated like a gangster… Our kids are way to important to cash them in for political correctness or political opportunity.” The level of insincerity exemplified here is mind-boggling.

As I’ve said before, the tragedy in Trayvon’s killing is it lays bare the rawness of our collective suspicion of black males and the indifference we have towards the plight of minorities when the majority feels threatened.  Riddle’s statement reinforces this inequality.  Despite her faint qualifying nod to egalitarianism by making this statement to “black or white” alike, Riddle knows she is scolding minorities alone for looking like gangsters.  Don’t complain if you get killed.  Stop being so suspicious.

So as a father I get why Geraldo Rivera lazily blamed the hoodie.  I won’t defend what he said, but I can certainly understand the desperation. Contrary to Riddle, Rivera’s admonishment was not a reinforcement of society’s suspicions, but an indictment of them.  His was a survival skill, while hers was a declaration of ownership, a warning.

Still, I have a difficult time joining my friends over this by wearing a hoodie in solidarity with Trayvon.  When smart folks like Melissa Harris-Perry mock those who scold minorities for wearing blue or red, or for wearing saggy pants, common dress for gang members, I cannot help but cringe.  I remember well walking through East Los Angeles as a teenager, conscious of what I was wearing.  It was not right, but social justice was not my immediate concern.

Professors, political analysts and others who know why Trayvon’s killing was a miscarriage of justice are right to be outraged by the way the world works.  They are absolutely right to try and change that.  But if it takes dressing a certain way to maximize survival in the meantime, that’s how I’ll encourage my boy to dress.  It’s Debbie Riddle’s world, for now. And in Riddle’s world wearing the “right” clothes is still no guarantee that my son will ever walk this world above suspicion. She and her ilk are doing their very best to keep it that way.

Stephen A. Nuño, Ph.D,  NBCLatino contributor and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Northern Arizona University. He is currently writing a book on Republican outreach into the Latino Community.