College student @janeithedoll recently tweeted, “My professor just said, ‘Take your hoodie off… you’re not going for skittles and sweet tea’….. I’m speechless.”
The teacher’s remark makes a disrespectful reference to murdered 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was gunned down in 2012 after walking to a 7-Eleven to get a bag of Skittles and a can of Arizona Iced Tea. Martin was wearing a hoodie. His murder triggered a movement and helped inspire Black Lives Matter protests.
Martin would have been 26 years old this month. He was born on Feb. 5, 1995 and was killed on Feb. 26, 2012 at the age of 17.
George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain, called 911 after deeming Martin “suspicious.” All Trayvon did was walk through the neighborhood in a hoodie. During a confrontation with the unarmed Martin, Zimmerman claimed he shot and killed the teen in self-defense.
Subsequent tweets and replies in @janeithedoll’s thread suggest she attends a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in Georgia and the female teacher is Black. The student also noted that she reported the incident to the school’s president, who she said was handling the situation.
Twitter had lots to say.
“There is literally no commonly known correlation between a hoodie and sweet tea & skittles outside of Trayvon Martin. The professor’s comment was extremely inappropriate, even if they are Black. (Them even telling you what to wear is a whole other issue itself.),” tweeted one person.
Mental health advocate Dr. La Shawn Paul tweeted, “The fact that the professor is Black shows how deep white supremacy runs. It literally has the oppressed internalizing and spewing the bull****.”
Martins’ murder drove many people into activism, including Nupol Kiazolu, former head of Black Lives Matter for Greater New York.
“Trayvon Martin’s murder really forced me to come face to face at an early age of who this country actually is and how it views me as a young Black woman in America,” Kiazolu told Radio.com. “When Trayvon Martin was murdered by George Zimmerman and I found out about it, my immediate emotions were anger and confusion. At the time I couldn’t fully articulate how I felt, but I knew that I was angry and had to do something.”
Kiazolu, now 20, was just 12 years old when Martin was killed. It touched her sense of justice. She then came up with the idea of holding a silent protest. She put the message, “Do I Look Suspicious?” on the back of a gray hoodie and carried Skittles and iced tea in her hand — the two items Martin was holding at the time of his death.
This led to a full-on silent protest at her school in which “…literally every student in there had their hoodies on with the same exact message taped to their back. My teacher and I just stood there and cried,” she said.
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 73: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin makes the case for why this is a multi-factor rebellion vs. just protests about George Floyd. He discusses the Democratic Party’s sneaky relationship with the police in cities and states under Dem control, and why Joe Biden is a cop and the Steve Jobs of mass incarceration.
Zimmerman was arrested on a murder charge but a jury consisting of six people, five of whom were white, ruled he was not guilty. Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges.
Broward County, Florida State Rep. Shevrin Jones this month introduced a bill to repeal the Stand Your Ground law, which allows people to use deadly force when acting in self-defense. In the 16 years since Florida passed it, Stand Your Ground has been adopted by most U.S. states.
Zimmerman auctioned off the gun he killed Trayvon with, selling it for $138,900.
