Not sure what the Zimmerman circus says about race in America - the bad, sad, ridiculous, dysfunctional, absurd stuff we already knew and the political motivation behind much of the hyperbole and the rhetoric of perpetual grievance is a well worn path obvious to anyone who wants to see it - although I would be interested in polls targeting Latino impressions of the verdict seeing as how Zimmerman identified as an Hispanic regardless of liberal media’s concerted efforts to assign him into a racial grouping of their own conjuring called ‘white Hispanic’ - fascinating people, liberals - anyway, polls of Latino reaction to the verdict would be quite illuminating viz GOP hopes of somehow gaining traction in that demographic. I know that Hispanic activist groups distanced themselves thoroughly from Zimmerman, but I’d be curious to know what the average Latino thinks about it all.
But aside from that, regardless of what it says about race in America, what it says about political ideology and perception is clear: liberals are idealists who use feelings and sentiment to drive a conceptual view of the world that does not necessarily need to reference anything real - in fact, such a realist limitation can often prove dispiriting in the extreme and is therefore to be avoided at all costs; conservatives are sceptics whose opinions are empirically grounded and who seek to draw reasonable conclusions from logically rendered facts. This is of course to grossly generalize things - still, if you look at reactions to verdict, it hews close to reality: liberals see racism because their sentiments tell them that for their world view to make sense that’s the concept that must be at play here regardless of what some objectively distilled truth might be suggesting to the contrary; whereas conservatives say the prosecution’s case was rotten with reasonable doubt and therefore there was no just way to convict Zimmerman of the crime he was intemperately charged with. Simple as that. Any attempt to make it something other than that is to engage in the spinning of narratives for dubious reasons.
