But the delicate nature of the administration’s handling of the case became apparent when Obama offered his own public comment on the subject, saying “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” His remark, which drew wide praise for humanizing the tragedy, was also pilloried by Newt Gingrich. “Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK, because it didn’t look like him? That’s just nonsense, dividing this country up.”

Getting the balance right has been a constant, and historic, challenge for both Holder and his boss. “Given who I am, I am acutely aware of our nation’s historical, and current, struggle with issues of racial injustice,” Holder says. But “I understand that my personal focus must also be a broad one. I am the attorney general of the United States and the concerns of the entirety of our nation must be, and are, my primary responsibility.”

Obama and Holder have been wrestling with that balance since their earliest days in office. They are both black men raised outside the African-American mainstream (Obama as the son of a white mother and an African father; Holder’s family comes from the West Indies). Both worked their way into the top tier of America’s professional and political elite. They have led lives committed to racial progress and yet are wary of being defined by the color of their skin. And they are both married to smart, principled women who are themselves the descendants of American slaves and who in some ways act as their husbands’ consciences on race. (The wives are also good friends; the first lady sometimes stops by for “pizza night” at the Holders’ home.)

Both men have also felt the searing pain of racism. In Dreams From My Father, Obama writes about the time a tennis pro told him not to touch the schedule of games pinned up on a bulletin board because his “color might rub off.” When Holder was a young Justice Department lawyer, he had his own brush with racial profiling; he was stopped by police while dashing to catch a movie in Georgetown. They shined a floodlight on him and asked him why he was running.

The shooting of McDade has opened long-festering wounds in northwest Pasadena, where a majority of African-Americans say they have a bad relationship with police. Although Pasadena is known as a place with pockets of extreme wealth and the home of the Rose Bowl, northwest Pasadena is a neighborhood plagued by violence and poverty. There have been four shootings in the small community in the last year alone.

In a 2006 survey conducted by the Police Assessment Resource Center (PARC), African-Americans living in northwest Pasadena said members of the Pasadena Police Department unjustly targeted them.

Officer-involved-shooting fatalities in northwest Pasadena are relatively rare, however. The last fatality occurred in 2009, when 37-year-old reputed Blood gang member Leroy Barnes was shot by officers 11 times—with seven of those rounds hitting him in the back—after a routine traffic stop. Barnes’s shooting was looked into by the County of Los Angeles Office of Independent Review, which questioned the tactical decisions made by the two officers involved in the shooting. The committee recommended better training of officers and better communication with the community. In 2010, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office concluded that the shooting by the officers was “lawful self-defense.”

As conflicting details of McDade’s death continue to trickle out, tensions are beginning to mount. Community members have criticized the police department for not keeping the neighborhood abreast of the police investigation, and questioned whether the shooting was justified. “The community is ready to go up in smoke,” said neighborhood activist William Greer. “The police department’s job is to serve and protect. They just can’t go around shooting people. It is the wild wild west here in northwest Pasadena.”

In an attempt to save money, the Florida legislature passed a bill last year that required all welfare recipients to be drug tested. The law required welfare recipients to pay in advance for their drug test with a refund promised if they proved to be drug free. Those who fail are ineligible to receive government aid for a year. However, the law has since been blocked as unconstitutional in federal court. But not only that, because of the expense and inconvenience, it ended up costing more money that it saved as only a few of those on government assistance have tested positive for drug use.

Living in Sin In The Sunshine State

Many young couples live together without being married. In most places, that’s normal. In Florida, that’s illegal. Section 2 of Chapter 798 of Title XLVI of the Florida Code prohibits “any man and woman, not being married to each other, lewdly and lasciviously associat[ing] and cohabit[ing] together.” However, even getting married may not get Floridians off the hook if they have more exotic tastes in the bedroom. The statute also prohibits all state residents, regardless of martial status, from “engag[ing] in open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior.” It seems clear that once you get south of Georgia, it’s safer to be a prude than lewd.

Voter Registration

But while race is undeniably a factor in the power of the rumors, it’s not the only one, and the connection between race-related feelings and rumor-mongering is more complicated than it appears at first glance. If we’re actually going to understand why the Martin rumors exploded, we’re going to need some more-nuanced explanations.

Psychology is our friend here. Since rumors are such an important part of human life, from the boardroom to counterinsurgency efforts, psychologists have been studying for decades how they spread and what can be done to slow them down when they are false. They’ve also devoted a great deal of research to the proximal question of which pieces of information are most likely to stick out in our minds—the things we’re most likely to pass on to a friend.

One key factor here is the overwhelming lack of concrete information about what happened in the moments immediately before Zimmerman killed Martin. This makes the story inherently vulnerable to rumors, according to Rochester Institute of Technology psychologist Nick DiFonzo, an expert on rumor research and the author of The Watercooler Effect: A Psychologist Explores the Extraordinary Power of Rumors. “Whenever there’s a little bit of uncertainty and it doesn’t seem to make sense, people get very surprised when they hear this story, and they’re wondering, ‘Well, what? What happened? Why did it happen? That’s crazy,’ ” he said. “They’ll try to fill it in with rumors, speculation.”

We are inherently bothered by an incomplete story. When we see holes in a narrative, we do whatever we can to plug them with the tools we have at hand. Rumors are an excellent solution, because they can be shaped to fit any gap that we come across. "It’s hard to stay in an ambiguous mode and accept uncertainty," DiFonzo says. The more clear-cut a given story, the less likely it is to spawn rumors. “If people will supply some harder facts, it’s harder to wiggle,” he adds. “You have to wiggle around the new facts.” In the Martin case, there is an enormity of wiggle room.

But what was really disturbing about the more-than-20-minute showdown was the relative ease Morgan took in dismissing the African-American writer’s long and well-documented journalism background. Yes, Touré suggested that Morgan be professional in his initial tweet, but Morgan crossed the line by insinuating that Touré wasn’t a real journalist at all and by offering him tips on how real journalists do their jobs. That displayed a level of arrogance by Morgan that was completely uncalled for.

Those quips seemed to be all Morgan had in response to Touré’s suggestion that he didn’t fully appreciate the historical situation at hand. The writer even painfully added that after only being in the United States for seven years, Morgan could have no clue as to how deep the black-white divide actually is in this country. A fair point on many levels. The trials of blacks in Europe are based on a different set of circumstances, though the attitudes toward race and history’s consequences may be the same. African-Americans are the only group of once-enslaved people who continued to live in the area where their ancestors were held in shackles.

That creates a unique and tense dynamic for this country that is too often dismissed and misunderstood. But even more to the point, if Touré were not a serious journalist, why have him on the show in the first place? Why be so offended by a nonjournalist’s criticism when Twitter is full of such negative critiques aimed daily at the work of everyone from Don Cheadle to Lady Gaga. Jamal1 and Ray Ray23# had the same thoughts as Touré, so why not have them on for a heartfelt chat? Or better yet, debate my 78-year-old Aunt Josephine in Macon, Ga., who was also in complete agreement with Touré but just didn’t have a Twitter account to express it. (I’m setting her up with one next week.) How Aunt Josephine would relish the chance to put on her signature red lipstick and red “Sunday go-to-meeting hat” to go a round or two with Morgan on air. That would surely cement her star status as the toast of the Macon County church missionary club for years to come.

Though Pamela Bondi, the special Florida prosecutor appointed to oversee the Martin case has asked the city for patience, growing evidence contradicting Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense now has some worried that the measured calm across Sanford won’t last much longer.

The city has seen its share controversial racial incidents. In 2010 the son of a Sanford lieutenant was caught on tape beating a homeless black man but wasn’t arrested until the tape began airing on local televisions stations a month later.

“I get a little angrier every time I read or hear something about that kid,’’ says 24-year-old Travis James, an African-American auto repairman. “ To me this city doesn’t care about black people and then I heard Zimmerman’s dad talking about how the president and all the black people are filled with hate. What was his son filled with that night? We always have to be the bigger people and keep our calm and do the right thing. I get tired of that.’’ 
 
George Zimmerman’s father, Robert, a former judge, told a local Florida news station that President Obama, organizations like the NAACP, and many others have expressed intense hate towards his son for weeks. President Obama told reporters, “If I had a son he would look like Trayvon,’’ when asked about the incident last week. 
 
“We understand from a father’s stand point that he’s trying to protect and support his son,’’ said Martin family lawyer Benjamin Crump. “Just like Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin would have liked to have done for their son Trayvon on the night he died. But people aren’t blind. They heard the 911 calls and they saw the video that disputes everything his son has said. His son needs to be arrested.’’ 
 
Sources inside the Sanford Police Department say they are well aware of the potential for social unrest and of growing anger due not arresting Zimmerman. As a result, the source says, extra patrols have been on standby for weeks, and neighboring cities have been alerted in the event assistance is needed.

‘This city has been heading down this path for a while,’’ said a well-placed source in the police department. “They didn’t understand how this case would blow up, but they should have. Tempers have been up in the air since the black homeless man incident a few years ago. That kind of thing can only happen a few times before people lose it.’’

Such a stupid, innocuous garment.

It has never had the fear factor of black leather or steel-toe boots. Swaggering rappers and tough guys were never able to take full ownership of hoodies; they weren’t able to exploit them for their own purposes like baggy jeans or oversized white t-shirts. There was too much that was functional, cuddly, and universal about hoodies for them to be fully co-opted. Too broad a population embraced them. They remained rooted in weekend athleticism and collegiate sports, the Gap and Old Navy. Suburban dads wear them when they mow their lawn. Soccer moms wear them to soccer games. Channel surfers pull them on for pizza and beers.

Still, it makes a striking visual statement to see throngs of protesters dressed in hoodies. It is a stirring message when a minister--having exchanged his regal robes for a hoodie—preaches to congregants about humanity, love, and fellowship. And it was a bold statement for Rep. Bobby Rush to ignore a stern House dress code and wear a hoodie as he spoke against racial profiling in Congress. (The Illinois Democrat’s decision to accessorize with dark sunglasses, however, detracted from his point. At that point, he frankly did look rather cagey.)

Geraldo Rivera was lambasted for suggesting that a hoodie was as culpable in Martin’s death as the shooter. He later apologized for his remarks. But the fact is, we do like to play with our public image—pretending that it doesn’t matter and yet knowing full well that it does. Baggy jeans became popular among young men—whether honor-roll students or delinquents—thanks to all of their negative, subversive connotations. Walking up to the edge of propriety and stepping over the line are all a rite of passage to self-definition.