Juan Williams is a liberal black columnist for Fox News who tries not to be radical and generally succeeds. I don't often find myself agreeing with him, but here is a clear exception.
Williams has written an appraisal of the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman trial that I find does a balanced job of seeing how sad this whole thing is for everybody concerned ... actually for our whole society.
Williams pinpoints the mainstream media's faulty insistence on making this a black-white racial tragedy. They entirely overlooked that Zimmerman is a Hispanic who could himself have faced discrimination.
Nobody comes out of this situation looking good: not the press, not the legal system, not Mr. Zimmerman, not Rachel Jeantel. I fear it will degenerate into another O.J. Simpson trial where virtually every white person has one view of guilt and virtually every black person violently disagrees with that view.
It's an example of the old adage sometimes attributed to Nelson Mandela, "Where you stand depends on where you sit" - an elegant way to describe acting from self-interest. One can easily imagine Mandela saying this in his classic, gentle irony.
