I know there’s still a lot of emotion wrapped up in this case, and I think what it comes down to is we can’t let go of that initial impression we built of Trayvon in our minds. The first couple weeks of media coverage made us all picture this good student and athlete who’d run afoul at school and was on suspension for something that was perfectly understandable. It was why many of us (myself included) wanted to ignore things like the jewelry, the screwdriver, and the reports of an empty baggie.

In light of that, I think we all have to stop and admit to ourselves that the media misled us about who Trayvon really was, gave us this fictional character in our minds that we played through a scenario that “seemed right.” We don’t want to let that character go because we’ve got so much emotion invested in him, a need to believe that he’s real and that he’s the victim. Don’t want to admit that he might not have been a model student, might have been running with the wrong crowd, might have been actually been the kind of kid who’d punch a perfect stranger in order to gain street cred.