George Zimmerman is all-American
We are a nation of immigrants and descendants of immigrants from different parts of the globe.
As such, a blurring of the color lines is only a natural outcome away from the established norms of racial and ethnic identity.
Those issues of race and ethnicity should eventually become less relevant, even if the issues of wealth and class are still tied somewhat to the older, more well defined definitions of racial identity.
As more people of non-specific racial backgrounds intermingle across familial and social confines, the degree to which any strict adherence to any specific definition would be diminished... Theoretically, of course.
However, in spite of the persistence of maintaining those older and less relevant definitions of race and identity, we must insist on classifying ourselves solely on the basis of individual national origin.
No matter our name, or race, or skin color, or the origin of our parents, we must insist on calling ourselves as nothing more than "Americans".
In a way, that should be our only racial identity.
However, the classication of those first and foremost who must change the dynamic are the people who are in the position of the majority. Namely, the almagamation of national origins identified as "white people".
In spite of the fact that class and wealth, as well as definitions of established norms are still entwined with racial and ethnic identity in this country, we need to reassess the importance of this way that we identify ourselves. For you see, demographics are quickly changing.
Who we identify as a the standard of Americaness today and in the future will look and sound nothing like what we've known in the past.
In the future, people of varied and non-specific racial and ethnic indentity, like Zimmerman will find themselves as the new "white". Except for the fact it really doesn't mean anything and has no basis in reality. It's all made up and thus anyone can be called white if we play that game.
But regardless of such a faulty assessment, we all must insist that purity is a myth. It always has been. This interchange of race and ethnicity has always been the norm. Especially in open societies of almagamation like ours.
It's time to define who we are, in spite of what we look like, as merely "American".
That's how the rest of the world looks at us.
We need to do the same for ourselves.
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What matters are his own motives and actions.
If he chose to racially profile someone and then shoot that person to death, then he's the one in the wrong here.
How he self-identifies, in spite of his own actual ethnicity is more an issue for him than it is me.
If he lives a life where he defines himself in a faulty way (i.e., anything other than solely "American"
, yet insists on focusing on the definition of others (Black-American and otherwise)… To me, that makes him wrong.
It doesn't matter what he actually is, it matters what he thinks he is… And he should have been thinking of himself and of others only in terms of being "American".