Ta Nehisi Coates, at the Atlantic, and Jelani Cobb, at the New Yorker, have done an amazing job breaking down why the entire story -- from the kid's death, to the police's reluctance to investigate, to the smearing of the kid, to the exoneration of his killer -- is a quintessentially American tragedy, entirely rooted in the color of the kid's skin. In short: it wasn't murder, and that's the problem.
I'm having a hard time writing anything that isn't just paraphrasing one or the other of them. So instead of stringing together a bunch of decontextualized quotes that end up hacking apart their stellar writing, here's a few of the pieces that stood out:
Ta Nehisi Coates, "Trayvon Martin and the Irony of American Justice" -- in which he argues that "the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman is not an error in programming. It is the correct result of forces we set in motion years ago and have done very little to arrest."
Jelani Cobb, What The Zimmerman Trial Was About -- on fear and correlations.
Ta Nehisi Coates, "How Stand Your Ground Relates to George Zimmerman" -- on the fact that 'stand your ground' and 'self defense' in Florida are one and the same.
Jelani Cobb, "Zimmerman, Everyman" -- "This apparent contradiction—the prevalence of racist attitudes, the disavowal of actual racism—is key to understanding the way Zimmerman has been received. His actions are understandable, even reasonable, because it doesn’t take a racist to believe black males equal danger."