Trayvon Martin and Emmet Till
The Martin and Till cases have both caused an uproar in the African American community. In both cases, an unarmed young black man becomes the target for an apparent hate crime. The articles claim that officials are not sure whether the attacks were intentional or a result from self-defense.
“An analysis of scrapings from underneath the teenager’s fingernails did not contain any of Zimmerman’s DNA, as might rub off in the case of a prolonged struggle.”
In the case of Trayvon Martin, CNN reported that Martin did not have Zimmerman’s DNA, which raises the question whether Zimmerman was actually assaulted by Martin or did Zimmerman shoot Martin out of fear and hate?
Same applies for the Till case. Did Till actually whistle at the white lady? We will never know for sure.
One thing we know for sure is that racism still exists in our society. People still struggle to get along with others, which makes it difficult to believe that the Martin case was the result of self-defense.
You have a nice clear writing voice, which is great. It looks that you chose to do a side by side analysis between the detail in the Martin article about there being no DNA traces and the passage in Till about no one being sure about the whistle.
My concern with your close reading is that you aren’t really looking at the writerly choices or the way language is being used in these texts. You are essentially commenting on the fact that there is an element of unknown about the degree to which the young black men in both cases actually provoked their murders. That is too broad and not related to how the writing it self is structured. The problem when your scope is large and your object of consideration isn’t the language of the article or novel is that you run the risk of not noticing potentially weak logical moves and comparisons. If you were going to write a paper based on this post, you would need to think about the difference between the alleged whistle and the (we know it’s not there) DNA. Right now you present them as the same thing, but they are not. Indeed they might be more interesting to think about as actually being the complete opposite thing but still getting the same results.