"Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites."

Stanford University's Shelby Steele has a great essay titled "The Exploitation of Trayvon Martin".

Excerpt:

In fact Trayvon's sad fate clearly sent a quiver of perverse happiness all across America's civil rights establishment, and throughout the mainstream media as well. His death was vindication of the "poetic truth" that these establishments live by. Poetic truth is like poetic license where one breaks grammatical rules for effect. Better to break the rule than lose the effect. Poetic truth lies just a little; it bends the actual truth in order to highlight what it believes is a larger and more important truth. 

The civil rights community and the liberal media live by the poetic truth that America is still a reflexively racist society, and that this remains the great barrier to black equality. But this "truth" has a lot of lie in it. America has greatly evolved since the 1960s. There are no longer any respectable advocates of racial segregation. And blacks today are nine times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by whites. 

If Trayvon Martin was a victim of white racism (hard to conceive since the shooter is apparently Hispanic), his murder would be an anomaly, not a commonplace. It would be a bizarre exception to the way so many young black males are murdered today. If there must be a generalization in all this—a call "to turn the moment into a movement"—it would have to be a movement against blacks who kill other blacks. The absurdity of Messrs. Jackson and Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites.

There is now a long litany of racial dust-ups—from Tawana Brawley to the Duke University lacrosse players to the white Cambridge police officer who arrested Harvard professor Skip Gates a summer ago—in which the poetic truth of white racism and black victimization is invoked so that the actual truth becomes dismissible as yet more racism...

It has given us a generation of ambulance-chasing leaders, and the illusion that our greatest power lies in the manipulation of white guilt. The tragedy surrounding Trayvon's death is not in the possibility that it might have something to do with white racism; the tragedy is in the lustfulness with which so many black leaders, in conjunction with the media, have leapt to exploit his demise for their own power.

Steele eloquently tells the truth. In my view, the real villains here are not really the race-hucksters like Jackson and Sharpton. They're beneath contempt, but there have always been amoral opportunists who profit from hate and violence.

The real villains are the mainstream media, who are charged with the task of telling the truth. The truth here is very clear: there is an epidemic of murder of young black men. Most of these murders are committed by young black men.

We need to understand why this has happened, and how we can stop the killing.

The media-- for reasons of stupidity or ideology or cowardice-- merely repeats the lies of the race-hucksters. This is costing thousands of young lives every year.

It's very hard to stop the killing when the media won't even tell the simple truth about it.