HEATHER MACDONALD: Why Manipulate the Tragedy of Trayvon Martin? “So determined has the New York Times been to fit the shooting into its favored racial story line that it has been referring to the Zimmerman as a ‘white Hispanic,’ contrary to its usual practice of referring to Hispanics without any additional racial characterization.”

Plus this: “Blow’s fear that his children will be blown away by a white is particularly ludicrous in New York City. Blacks commit 80 percent of all shootings in the city — as reported by the victims of and witnesses to those shootings — though they are but 23 percent of the population; whites commit 1.4 percent of all shootings, though they are 35 percent of the population. Add Hispanic shootings to the black tally, and you account for 98 percent of all of the city’s gun violence. In New York, as in big cities across the country, the face of violence is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic.”

Yes, but racists see everything as distorted by a haze of fear of The Other.