We know now that he was an A and B student, a good boy, not that his nature must be qualified for his death to matter. He had been talking to a friend before he died. He had a pack of Skittles and a bottle of iced tea. He was killed by self-appointed neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman, 28 years old, who claimed he shot the young man in self-defense. On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin, a 17 year old boy from Florida was found shot dead. Heaven forbid we place culpability where it belongs. These derailments serve to shift blame from the rapist to the victim because heaven forbid we ask the rapist what he was wearing or doing or thinking when he decided to commit a crime. When a woman is raped, she is interrogated about her choices that contributed to her rape–what she wore, her level of intoxication, her sexual history, and so on.
Take rape, for example, and the use of victim blaming as a derailing strategy. There are many strategies these people will try to use, all designed to shift focus from culpability and what really matters to lesser topics that are largely irrelevant or that miss the point entirely. Oftentimes when having difficult conversations about complex topics, certain kinds of people (the small-minded, feeble-minded, profoundly ignorant, etc.) will try to derail the conversation.
