But none of these questions—which, it should be said, didn’t necessarily invalidate Zimmerman’s claims—mattered to the millions of people who had a eureka moment as they read the latest twist: of course Martin was the aggressor! They clicked eagerly, and soon a variety of ostensibly damning facts about Martin were racing around the Internet: not only the Sentinel story, but also Martin’s tweets (which show him to be guilty of nothing more serious than being a teenager) and reports that he had been found with trace amounts of marijuana and possibly stolen jewelry in his bag at school.

None of these facts had any bearing on the case at hand, of course, nor did they change what we know to be true (almost all of which comes from Zimmerman’s 911 call). But a sizable chunk of America reflexively decided that Zimmerman had defended himself against a dangerous, suspicious black teen, and they urgently spread the word. This wasn’t restricted to anonymous bomb throwers; the respectable right chimed in as well. Victor Davis Hanson, considered a conservative intellectual, wrote: “Martin is emerging not quite as a model pre-teen, Skittle-eating student with a slight truancy problem, but as a 6 foot 2 inch teen with troubled Twitter allusions to criminal activity, an obscene n-word Twitter ID, and suspensions entailing possible drug use and theft.”

Of course, that Zimmerman likely outweighed Martin by 50 pounds or more, or that the worst “criminal activity” alluded to in the Twitter account was smoking pot, or that a black teenager has a different relationship to the n-word than a middle-aged white pundit, or that Martin was not suspended for theft but for possessing trace amounts of marijuana didn’t matter. No. What mattered was that this version of events was so much more palatable and digestible than the notion that race had played a part in the death of an unarmed black teen (which is so...liberal). And that’s why the story festered and spread like a virus.

It’s a profound failure of our information environment, and it can be traced in part to a lack of skepticism. In retrospect, there was so little reason for the Zimmerman account to have changed anyone’s view of the case. Neither he nor the Sanford Police Department were disinterested observers. He, after all, was facing potential murder or manslaughter charges, and the department was shielding itself from a nationwide barrage of criticism for not arresting him.

Zimmerman had called 911 46 times in the past eight years. No doubt each time he called, he thought he perceived a different threat. One black kid walking alone. Two black kids walking alone. A black kid holding something. A black kid looking around suspiciously.

How many 911-like alarms have been rung since Obama was elected? His friendship with Bill Ayers demonstrated that he had the heart of a terrorist. His association with Jeremiah Wright confirmed that he hated America. Hello, Operator. Send help, Obama is a socialist! He bailed out Detroit because he’s in bed with the unions. He’s also in cahoots with the banks and screwing the common man.  Plus, he’s turned on the American financial system and, yes, is screwing the common man. Help, police, his health-care plan is a plot to put all our civil liberties in the hands of a totalitarian government! He’s looking around at our institutions, at our individual freedoms, at our God-given right to be American...

We don’t think he was born in America. We’re going to follow him.

And that hoodie. True, it’s sometimes a fashion statement that means trouble. But on that night, it was raining. The hoodie wasn’t necessarily in the form of something meant to be menacing. It was the function of something meant to be protective. It was a way for Martin to shelter himself from bad weather. It had a physical justification that should have made Zimmerman check his automatic responses. Instead, it must have rattled Zimmerman because he couldn’t see Martin’s face. Unable to see his face, Zimmerman projected onto the teenager his worst fears.

The 65-year-old Rush himself bursts with confidence, boosted by 10 terms in Congress, winning nine of them with 80 percent of the vote. The drubbing of Obama in 2000 was his closest contest since winning office in 1992, still doubling his opponent, 61 percent to 30 percent.

But while Rush has ingrained himself as the “only man to ever beat Obama” in the minds of many Americans, he had been rather quiet on the issue of Trayvon Martin prior to Wednesday. His Twitter account—one place where the Trayvon case gained steam on the national stage—did not mention Trayvon until Wednesday, when Rush spoke on the floor of the House.

Yet Rush has championed civil rights for much of his career, last year penning a column honoring the late Martin Luther King Jr. In honoring King, Rush scolded the country for not moving forward on the issue of minority rights. “If [King] were alive today, I believe he would demand that the nation take a hard look at the mass incarceration of young black and brown men and women that has eviscerated too many communities in our nation.”

Strong identification with the Trayvon case could also come from a tragedy in Rush’s own life. In the fall of 1999, his 29-year-old son Huey was shot and killed in Rush’s district in Chicago as the incumbent waged his campaign against Obama. The killer got 90 years in prison.

Twin Lakes has been in the national spotlight since one of its residents, George Zimmerman, shot and killed a 17-year-old boy named Trayvon Martin while Martin was walking through the neighborhood on a rainy February night. Martin, who was unarmed, was reportedly headed to a relative’s house. Zimmerman, who was carrying a concealed 9mm handgun and was the captain of the neighborhood-watch organization, told police that Martin had assaulted him after Zimmerman had asked why he was there.

Under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which allows people who believe they’re in danger to respond with deadly force, Zimmerman was not arrested, but Martin’s death has since inspired protests and public demonstrations nationwide. The U.S. Justice Department on March 20 announced a review of the case for possible civil-rights violations. Two days later, the Sanford police chief stepped down temporarily, and Florida Gov. Rick Scott announced the appointment of a special prosecutor in the case and a task force to review the controversial law. Even President Obama weighed in last week, saying, "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon."

In attempting to understand Zimmerman’s actions, much attention has been called to the fact that Martin was black, and to the frequency with which Zimmerman, who is half-white and half-Hispanic, called police in the years leading up to the shooting. Twin Lakes is almost 50 percent white, with Hispanic and African-American populations of about 20 percent each.

Conversations with several residents, however, suggest that Zimmerman’s calls reflect a wider feeling of concern and distrust in the community. For years, Twin Lakes residents had been on edge—demonstrated by their decision last September to start a neighborhood-watch organization, which was initiated by Zimmerman himself. The burglary of Olivia Bertalan’s home was just one of at least eight reported over the previous 14 months—several of which, neighbors said, involved young black men. On Feb. 26, the odds were stacked against Martin: he was a young black man in a neighborhood that was feeling besieged by crime and blaming it—fairly or not—on people who looked like him.

At least that is what the roommate said when he summoned the cops to their Sanford home on the evening of March 13. The roommate is said to have further advised police that Stakes’s threats carried the added weight of somebody who owns guns.

Unlike the February 22 incident, where Zimmerman actually used a gun to kill Trayvon Martin, Stakes did not even reach for a gun. Stakes could hardly contend that he had shot somebody out of self defense because he had not shot anybody at all.

And unlike in the Zimmerman case, the cops immediately arrested Stakes, charging him with “simple assault intent–threat to do violence.”

Stakes was duly fingerprinted and made to pose for a mugshot, as Zimmerman still has not in connection with the Martin shooting. To underscore the full gravity of the Stakes case, the police report noted that he did more than simply slam the door; he broke it.

Obama’s response was Obamalike – measured, dignified, sober, and ambiguous.  He refrained from acknowledging explicitly that race was part of the controversy.  Some infer that there is a racial element in his observation that “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”  But this statement can be read in several ways.  It can be seen as a declaration of racial common cause, as if Obama was saying:  I am moved by Trayvon’s fate because it reflects what could befall one of my own black children. Obama’s statement, however, can also be readily understood as an echo of the slogan that has been chanted by hundreds of thousands of people of all backgrounds who have imagined themselves in the place of the deceased teenager or his heartbroken parents:  “I am Trayvon Martin!”

The outcry that has pushed this tragedy to the center of public awareness is a commendable development in a society that habitually continues to devalue blacks’ lives. The way ahead, however, is covered with snares. The lackadaisical initial response of the police may have led to the loss of key evidence. Local authorities angered by state and federal intervention could sabotage investigations. Thoughtless provocateurs could forfeit the goodwill amassed by thoughtful protestors. The administration of criminal law, moreover, is vulnerable to cruel vagaries; wrongful acquittals do occur (as do wrongful convictions). One can only hope that, with the whole country watching, some semblance of justice can be salvaged in Florida.

This perception shadows black men, many of whom have stories of the car doors that lock when we walk past, the purses that are clutched as we approach, the glances laden with the expectation that we will do wrong.

And black boys’ parents, people like me, worry especially about our children encountering the police, or private individuals, like George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin’s killer, who have taken it upon themselves to act in that role. We worry that the wrong move, or attitude even, might leave our child sprawled on the pavement, yet another victim of a person armed with a gun who felt threatened.

These anxieties reflect not only anecdote and personal experience. Social-science research has documented the unfavorable stereotypes associated with young black men. Studies have found, for example, that research participants are more likely to mistake a cellphone for a gun when it is held by a black man than by a white one. The combination of being black and male can sometimes cause people to perceive a threat even when there isn’t one.

Black men labor under a cloud of suspicion partly due to the racist attitudes that have long shaped black life. Even people who openly profess “race doesn’t matter” may nonetheless respond to others on the basis of race. Americans are far from color-blind.

I’m far from the first to notice the similarities between the way people talk about Martin and the way they talk about rape victims, whose clothes and histories are often subject to scrutiny no matter how cut-and-dried the case seems. Like a rape victim, Martin’s past is being excavated for evidence that he might have provoked the harm done to him. It hardly matters that even if Martin had gotten high every day, it would have had zero relevance; it’s not as if marijuana use is linked to violence. Nor that it’s not unusual for a teenager to come across as obnoxious on Twitter. People were looking for some tenuous justification for treating him as complicit in his own death, and now they’ve found it. (For the record, I was also suspended from high school, though in my case for smoking cigarettes. I trust that should a stranger shoot me in the street, no one will treat this as a mitigating factor.)

On the surface, it’s odd that Martin’s image would become so politicized. No ideological capitulation would be required for conservatives to mourn his death—one can believe in gun rights and still believe that he shouldn’t have been killed. A real NRA fanatic, after all, might make a case that Martin himself should have been armed, so that he could stand his ground against the paranoid man who was stalking him.

Certainly, it’s possible that some unknown evidence will emerge to complicate the current narrative of what happened between Zimmerman and Martin. Zimmerman claims that after he’d been following Martin, the young man attacked him, and according to the Orlando Sentinel, police found him “bleeding from the nose, [with] a swollen lip and had bloody lacerations to the back of his head.” No matter how things unfolded, there’s no excuse for those like Spike Lee who have tweeted Zimmeran’s home address; if nothing else, this case should make clear the horror of vigilantism.

Zimmerman’s story of that evening is in sharp contrast to recently released 911 tapes that appear to show Zimmerman following Martin, though police asked him not to, and also contradicts Martin’s girlfriend’s statement that she urged the teenager to run after he noticed a man trailing him in an SUV.

“The young girl who was speaking to Trayvon on the cellphone was on the phone the entire time and heard Zimmerman approach him,” said Benjamin Crump, a lawyer for the Martin family. “Trayvon turned around, asked him why he was following him, and Zimmerman asked Trayvon what he was doing there. That does not sound like Travyon approached him first or attacked him.”

Craig Sonner, Zimmerman’s attorney, said the 911 tapes released so far in the Martin case relay only half of the chain of events of that night. The complete 911 tapes back up his client’s claims of self-defense, Sonner told the Today show, and he plans to invoke Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, which provides significant leeway for people who fear their life may be in jeopardy. He could not be reached by The Daily Beast.

Leslie Rogan, a Sanford, Fla., high-school teacher who attended the Sanford City Commission’s meeting on Monday reviewing Martin’s case, questioned Zimmerman’s account of his injuries and asked why, if they were serious, he didn’t need immediate medical attention.

The opening scene of season one demonstrates the invisible prop qualities of black people within Mad Men. Don Draper inquires of a black busboy why he chooses to smoke Old Gold cigarettes. A white bartender, who asks, “Is Sam here bothering you?” interrupts the dialogue with the busboy. This exchange demonstrates the authentic yet cynical attitude of Mad Men, and how this show is a more appropriate vehicle to highlight the stain of racism and the unconscious cruelty of white privilege than traditional network dramas.

Hollywood historically has attempted to reconfigure and rewrite America’s uneasy struggle with race and class. Issues of race are resolved with simplistic solutions and empty rhetoric, or when a rich and complex moment of history is presented, such as the civil rights movement, it is redesigned by writers who add white saviors as the catalyst for black freedom and/or frame black characters with child-like qualities in desperate need of guidance by enlightened northern liberals.

Sitcoms traditionally have remixed the Amos and Andy stereotype, from J.J. on Good Times, Shaynaynay on Martin, or Mr. Brown on TBS’s Meet the Browns. Dramas fare no better, as black characters often succumb to the “exceptional Negro” syndrome wherein a black character has broken through all the stereotypical barriers of poverty to earn a seat at the table of democracy. Black characters rarely are human— just props and one-dimensional cutouts of a writer’s imagination. Rarely do we witness the complexity of characters as seen in HBO’s Tremé, where categories are not easily defined, stereotypes are challenged, and social forces, not stereotypes, push people to make difficult and life-changing decisions.

Whether we are speaking of The White Shadow, Dangerous Minds, Mississippi Burning, The Blind Side, or Little House on the Prairie, on other television shows and films that share racial themes, white culture is spared the harsh reality of staring at the ugliness of racism, bigotry and cruelty. Mad Men dares to demonstrate how the invisible people surrounding Madison Avenue are forced to live with the indignities of being nothing more than a prop.