Pursuing Trayvon Martin

'Wrong time, wrong place' goes the classic expression. But the problem is that if you’re the wrong race, any time and place can be wrong. Under white supremacy, the black body brings its own wrongness with it, rewriting the rules for what counts as reasonable suspicion, standing your ground, and justifiable self-defense. These urgent and timely essays on the Trayvon Martin killing expose in unflinching detail the racialized norms of white social cognition, and why justice demands their revision. -- Charles W. Mills, CUNY Graduate Center
The chapters in Pursuing Trayvon Martin are written from a wide and diverse range of disciplinary perspectives: women’s studies, religious studies, criminology and criminal justice, Africana studies, philosophy, and psychology. . . . [One of] Pursuing Trayvon Martin’s strengths [is] its exhaustiveness in its thematic and analytical scope and the diversity of its authors and their approaches. . . . Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics will serve as an important point of reference as we continue in our struggle to understand this horrendous tragedy. Each piece begins a conversation that we should be on the alert for further development in a range of different fora. Yancy and Jones are to be commended for beginning this conversation and for their astute solicitation of work. The text’s scope, conceptual innovativeness, and thematic breadth give the work an archival quality. . . . This text honors the memory of Trayvon Martin. * APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience *