It's true that this murderous teenager gets treated gently by cops on the scene because he's white, but it feels relevant too that the killing he did was symbolic of national anti-Blackness

As a light-skinned poc, I'm fairly sure that someone who looks like me could have done the same thing and had similar results, at least in the moment (the later reaction, from media and discourse and the justice system, would, in all probability, show differences)

So it's not just that whiteness earns you protection, it's also that anti-Blackness is a highly relevant and valuable currency, even if you're not white

Another thing I think, which may be more controversial, is that "terrorist" may not be the most applicable term here, given connotative context

"Terrorism," as we've understood it since 9/11 at least, connotes a level of insurgency, of outside-the-system lawlessness, but this child was offering civilian support to law enforcement; to me that makes him an unofficialized arm of the ruling system

People who are inclined towards "law and order" are calling his murders self-defense, which in effect means that they want to post hoc judicially sanction his actions

You don't do that for "terrorists," you do that for people who have not been legally enabled to kill for the state, but do so anyway

His apparent view, and the view of the people supporting him, seems to be that he was doing what cops "should" have been doing all along, but couldn't because of "political correctness." That's vigilantism in favor of the state, not rebellion

Incidentally, this is all background to the accurate imo argument that these aren't "lone wolf" situations, they're just extremely logical outcomes of institutionalized white supremacy and anti-Blackness

Insisting that he be called a "terrorist" does a couple of things: it's a remnant of the toothless, linguistic "resistance" to anti-Muslim sentiment post 9/11, which essentially sought to make the term more inclusive, which you could write a whole separate essay about

And it obscures the fact that he believed himself to be, and others believe him to have been, acting in the interest of the state. It's cathartic language but doesn't much get at the Zimmerman adjacency of all of it

I'm not the language police on this, just pointing out that the way we talk about these things does have an influence on how we decide to deal with the result

Like Trump, this kid is one result of racist, anti-Black, authoritarian culture, not a cause, and treating either as an aberration rather than representative of a status quo is ultimately very dangerous to the people who are already in the most danger