Half-Baked: Weed, Race, and the Demonization of Trayvon Martin

Panel Two

Following Trayvon Martin’s shooting death, numerous right-leaning pundits placed responsibility for the incident upon the victim, portraying Martin as a dangerous, threatening hoodlum. The Neo-Nazi website Stormfront.com, seizing on Martin’s recent suspension from school for marijuana possession, was a particularly vigorous proponent of this view, leveling numerous false accusations about Martin’s past as a drug dealer. This paper will investigate Stormfront’s success in convincing “mainstream” conservative media outlets, including BusinessInsider.com and Twitchy.com, to pick up a story which, though quickly debunked, has maintained a great deal of popularity online. The successful labeling of the victim as a “deviant” shows, quite clearly, Americans’ hypocritical views on the issue of marijuana possession. What’s more, given its wildly disproportionate and inequitable affects on the African-American community, it comes as no surprise that the nation’s longtime War on Drugs has fostered ambivalent, highly racialized attitudes on the issue of drug possession throughout American culture at large.

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