A New York City woman trying to bug bomb her hair salon ended up actually bombing the entire building, triggering a collapse that injured a dozen people. Probably not injured at all, dancing around like the gopher in Caddyshack, were the roaches she was trying to kill.

Police believe the explosion was triggered by a combination of the improperly used bug bombs — which included Raid fumigating foggers and Decon bug bombs — and natural gas, which may have been leaking. According to the AP, the woman forgot to turn off the pilot light when she set off about two dozen canisters on Thursday.

At least three people are now in critical care and four firefighters were injured. One unconscious man had to be pulled from a third-story window and taken to the hospital.

According to the Daily News, the building has long been a fire hazard. In 2009, inspectors found that the first floor was “sinking in middle of building," with rotting floor joists and no fire stop material in the cellar. Residents, some apparently in illegally subdivided apartments, were ordered to leave the building and the owner was fined.

“We did have existing codes violations for this building. We’re looking into them,” FDNY Assistant Chief Robert Boyce told the Daily News.

[WSJ, photo via AP]

Officials are saying that the Gitmo hunger strike may be coming to an end: 99 of the 103 striking detainees have eaten a hot meal in the last 24 hours and only 45 remain on the force-feeding list. But Wells Dixon, an attorney for Djamel Ameziane, said he would remain “very skeptical” until he hears directly from his client that the strike is over.

Five years after his prostitute-induced fall from grace, Eliot Spitzer is back on the campaign trail. This time, he's got his cold, narrow glare set on the New York City Comptroller's office (the comptroller is the manager of the city's pension funds and a bunch of other financial things, depending on how badly you want to use the office to piss off Michael Bloomberg).

Yesterday, Spitzer left New York City to fly to Los Angeles to speak with Jay Leno, and boy was it... weird. First off, the segment started with a clip of Bill Hader (Leno's other guest) making fun of Spitzer on SNL. Then, Spitzer awkwardly portrayed himself as a cavalier prosecutor who kept the mob and Wall Street in line... until he made just one small mistake.

"How could you be this stupid?" Leno asks, as poor Bill Hader slumps further into his chair.

"Sometimes people take risks that are absolutely irrational," Spitzer said. "There's no explanation for it. It is a failure of judgement."

Spitzer is now leading in the polls, meaning that New York City could well have both Spitzer and Anthony Weiner in the two highest positions in the city (and if you try to tell me the City Council speaker is more powerful, so help me).

And then there's Spitzer's opponent, Scott Stringer, the mild-mannered Manhattan borough president who was cruising to an almost-unopposed victory in the comptroller race. Now, all of a sudden, he's up against a politician from the national stage running with his family's limitless real estate fortune.

But at least Spitzer can't buy the Lena vote. It cannot be sold.

A supervisor at a white-shoe law firm accused of sexually harassing one of his employees allegedly sent the woman laminated, illustrated erotic poems with lines like, “I enjoy you so. Your thick legs and all of the voluptuous plumpness that accents your womanhood."

Tyrone Turner, a supervisor in the mailroom at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, calls the accusations "frivolous," saying that he merely participates in poetry slams and distributed his writing to many coworkers.

According to Natalie Thorpe, who is suing Williams Lea, the outsourcing company that sent her to Cadwalader, Turner not only sent her the erotic poetry ("I love the way you giggle and the way your body jerks when I trace your tattoos with my tongue and rub you down with warm body oil"), but also tried to "kiss and hug her, locked her in his office and asked her to have sex with him on the vacant 35th floor."

The poems were allegedly laminated and decorated with a picture of a man kissing a woman who looked like Thorpe.

When Thorpe, who is married, refused his advances, she says she received negative performance reviews and had to leave the company. Turner, who is also married, says he voluntarily left the company and received a severance package.

[NYP, photo via Shutterstock]

Deep-frying is bullshit. It's messy and labor-intensive and user-unfriendly. It requires a ton of oil, most of which will be wasted, plus—most of the time anyway—dumb annoying messy crap like egg wash and flour and breadcrumbs. In its worst, most diabolical incarnations, it even requires friggin' leavening agents, which, I mean, holy shit, you might just as well just go outside and run yourself over with your car. You might just as well die. Fuck you, leavening agents.

And then there's the matter of managing the temperature. Unless you have a stupid digital thermometer or a specialized deep-fryer—which is to say, unless you are a goddamn Nazi—there's an awful lot of guesswork involved in controlling the temperature of your deep-frying: You test the oil with little tricks like sprinkling water or dropping a pinch of batter into it, and then eventually you get it as hot as you need it, and then you impatiently insert too much food into it and the temperature fucking plummets, and then you have to bring it back up to where it's supposed to be as quickly as possible, but then it gets too hot and turns into this black shit that smells like a bus wreck and the whole fucking enterprise is ruined, goddamn ruined, along with the air inside your home and any chance that you would ever know true happiness.

Too low a cooking temperature and your food comes out slimy and sodden with oil; too high a temperature and it only cooks on the outside (or bursts into flames, if your food happens to be an enormous fucking unthawed frozen turkey, ahem, America). The temperature window for perfect deep-fried food is as wide as a goddamn electron and you are never in it and your deep-fried food always comes out shitty, always always always, because deep-frying is bullshit, bullshit I tell you, the whole goddamn thing is bullshit, the system is bullshit, you're bullshit, no you need therapy.

And then you have to dispose of all that used oil. There is literally nothing worse than deep-frying.

Of course, here is where you say, "But what about deep-fried soft-shell crab?" and I nod and sigh and little glistening pools of saliva form at the corners of my mouth and I stare off into the vague middle distance as if I were thinking about the last days at An Loc. Deep-fried soft-shell crab is tasty enough to justify preparing even if doing so required you to pan-sear your gonads. Not only is the deep-fried soft-shell crab tastier than all the other things, it's about as close to un-fuck-up-able as a deep-fried foodstuff can get. The whole operation's incredibly straightforward, really: You make a tasty batter, you coat your crab in it, you cook your crab in hot oil, and then you eat it and 500 of its brethren in a wild-eyed frenzy, cramming them into your crazed, gnashing mouth by the fistful as though they were baby carrots and not entire freshly molted garbage-eating sea-bugs encrusted in a thick carapace of fried bread. Easy peasy.

With that in mind, hell, let's cook a couple of these things, and see if we can't redeem for ourselves the otherwise very stupid and indefensible activity of deep-frying stuff.

But wait. First, a note on acquiring soft-shell crabs that will bum out ethical vegetarians and the squeamish. Soft-shell crabs, like their hard-shelled siblings and their lobster cousins, must be purchased alive, because they fester and decay very quickly after death, and it can be difficult to determine exactly how recently they departed, since they stink even when they're alive. Don't let any fast-talking fishmonger or scary crabber in rubber overalls or pimply teenage seafood-counter clerk at your local supermarket sell you any soft-shell crabs that do not demonstrate obvious signs of vitality, such as moving when touched, writing unselfconsciously bad love poetry, and enjoying the musical stylings of the Misfits. Crabs that do not do all three of those things are dead, at least spiritually, and will cause you to become dead also, or anyway eating them will probably turn your colon into a crocodile.

So, buy a couple of living soft-shell crabs. You may be imagining that this course of action will result in the grisly, horrifying spectacle of a living, writhing creature being forcefully dunked into a bowl of thick batter and dropped into a vat of shriekingly hot oil even as it vigorously and vainly resists—which, holy shit, no fucking way—but thankfully that's not what's going to happen, because once you have verified that your crabs are alive (and thus have not been killed by any scary, scary, brain-rewiring parasites) and have purchased them, you are going to ask your friendly seafood-counter guy to speedily dispatch them for you. (Ask him to leave the mustard inside. He will know what this means, and your life will be better for it.) This will be a quick, grim, business involving a sturdy and sharp pair of kitchen shears; although it doesn't appear to be torturous or cruel, it's nevertheless sad and kind of awful and will make you feel like shit, but hey: crabs! Let's change the subject now!

(Oh, wait, another note: Because, again, crabs deteriorate very quickly after death, the very best thing to do is purchase your crabs—and have them swiftly rubbed out by the seafood clerk—the same day you intend to cook and consume them. If that's impractical, or circumstances force you to change your plans, it's OK to keep them sealed in their butcher paper in the coldest, lowest part of your refrigerator for another 24 to 36 hours, after which, if you're still not ready to cook them, they probably ought to be tossed. This, should it come to happen, will make the violent scissor-death of the crabs even more of a bummer than it already was. Please don't let this happen. Don't buy soft-shell crabs unless you're confident you can get the poor little fuckers cooked and appreciated in the ensuing day-and-a-half.)

Sad? Not hungry anymore? Sitting in a darkened room, your expressionless face lit starkly and unflatteringly by the glow of your computer screen? Me too! Let's cook and eat some smelly crustaceans. On your stove at home, heat up some oil in a medium saucepot. Use a sturdy oil (like canola or vegetable) and put, oh, maybe a little bit more than three inches of the stuff in the pot; you'll want at least an inch or two of clearance beneath the rim of the pot to protect against overflow and spattering, but you'll also need enough oil that a single batter-coated crab, when gently dropped into the pot, will submerge fully without thudding hard against the bottom. Don't use an enormous Dutch oven here; just a regular medium saucepot ought to do nicely. And just use medium heat; you'll wait a little while to get the temperature exactly where you want it, but that's OK, because doing this slowly will reduce the odds of your oil roaring right past its smoke point and turning into liquid tire-fire.

Now your oil is gradually heating on the stovetop; while it's doing that, unwrap your pair of soft-shell crabs and coat the crabs with a dusting of flour or cornstarch. Doesn't really matter which. This will absorb the surface moisture of the crabs and prevent the batter from sloughing off during cooking. Just let 'em sit there with their flour coating for a while, while you ...

... make batter. There are a couple of ways to go here. The first is to whisk together, say, a cup of flour, an egg, a tablespoon of baking powder, a bunch of Old Bay Seasoning, a couple small glugs of oil, and however much milk (added in increments) it takes to produce a result that is maybe just a little bit thicker than your typical cake-mix-in-a-box batter. The second, if you do not happen to be June Cleaver and therefore do not possess either baking powder or the faintest idea what baking powder might be, is to nix the baking powder and milk from the above list of ingredients and replace them with club soda, or lemon-lime seltzer, or cheap canned beer. Again, add in increments. You're looking for a result that is a little bit thicker than typical cake or pancake batter, but is also definitely batter and not dough. Thick enough to coat and cling to your soft-shell crabs, but liquid enough that they can be dunked into the stuff with no wrestling required. If your batter has the consistency of peanut butter, that's far too thick; if it's in the neighborhood of ketchup, that's more like it; if it's perfectly translucent and has the consistency of water, that is a glass of fucking water you fucking idiot what are you doing.

Batter ready? Good. Test the oil to see if it's ready for cooking, which is a thing that you must do because you do not own an instant digital thermometer, because "find and purchase instant digital thermometer" rightly falls lower on your list of life priorities than "own home" and "visit all 21 of the United States' UNESCO World Heritage sites" and "build a full-scale Millennium Falcon out of gold coins." There are a couple of ways to do this. The simplest is to dunk the tip of a wooden spoon in the oil and watch closely; if little bubbles form on the wooden spoon as though it were cooking, the oil is ready. If you don't have a wooden spoon, another way to test the oil is to scoop out maybe a tablespoon-sized dollop of your batter and gently drop it into the oil; if the oil is hot enough for cooking, the dollop of batter should start visibly cooking right away—sizzling and bubbling and so on—and be golden brown and crispy and cooked in less than 90 seconds. With a slotted spoon, get that wad of fried batter out of the oil and onto a paper towel, so that a few minutes from now you can furtively eat it even though it is just an Old Bay-flavored wad of fried batter and that's kind of a sad and weird thing to eat.

So now your oil is hot enough for cooking, your batter is ready, and your crabs are ever so steadily decomposing in a drift of flour over there, but let's not dwell on that part too much. Dunk one of your crabs in the batter, coating it thoroughly; give it a moment to drip off any outrageous excess of batter, then gently place it into the hot oil so that the oil does not splash all over your arms and cause your skin to slough off and go looking for a more responsible owner. Don't be ridiculous here and lower your crab into the oil one millimeter at a time; just bring the crab down to the surface of the oil and insert it in one smooth motion, and get your fingers the hell outta there.

You'll notice that the crab starts to cook immediately, as your wad of batter did. It'll sink down to the bottom of the pot and then promptly bob back to the surface, thanks to the air inside it. Give it, oh, maybe a minute or so? a little bit more than that?—and then gently roll the crab over in the oil with that slotted spoon of yours, just to make sure it's getting crispy and golden brown on all sides. Let it cook for maybe another minute, keeping an eye on it. Once it looks golden brown all over, it's cooked. Retrieve the crab from the oil and move it to a paper towel or a cooling rack or wherever, but not to your mouth or else your head will burst into flames and that will be a bad deal for you, buddy, even though it will be pretty funny for the rest of us. Repeat with your other crab.

A few minutes later you'll have two crispy, golden-brown, deep-fried soft-shell crabs sitting on a paper towel or cooling rack on your countertop. They're still awfully hot and could probably use another minute to cool. You can use this time to make tartar sauce. Now, there are fancy (or, well, fancier, anyway) versions of tartar sauce out there, involving horseradish and capers and tarragon, parsley and chives and olives, dijon mustard and lemon zest and gold-leaf and sailing to Monaco and playing polo with well-tanned people who speak in affected Euro accents. These tartar sauces are delicious, every snooty, tarted-up one of 'em. With that in mind, dump some stupid mayonnaise into a bowl with a scoop of sweet-pickle relish, give it a fucking stir with a fucking spoon, and try not to get any on your Queensrÿche half-shirt from 1988.

Pull out and open a couple of hamburger buns. Drop a soft-shell crab on each of them. There. You are done. Serve with beer.

So that was a pain in the ass, wasn't it? The stupid batter-making and oil-testing, the sad plight of the poor little crabs, and now a pot full of useless, mildly Old Bay-scented oil that you have to deal with*, and now this stupid little sandwich with a bunch of weird breaded legs sticking out of it can't possibly be tasty enough to justi—oh. Oh my. Ohhhhhhh. Mmmmmmmmmm. Crispy and crunchy and briny and sweet, rich from the crab mustard and tartar sauce, with just enough piquant heat from the Old Bay and hot sauce to coax your palate to full attention. Gloriously sloppy and intoxicatingly indulgent. You are crunching and chewing and smiling and making a low, indecent noise in your throat, and whuzzat about oil? I unno whumgonna mmmmmmmcrab.

*OK, but seriously, about that oil: You do need to deal with it. When it's fully cooled, pour the oil into an empty milk carton (the kind with a screw-on lid), screw the lid on, and pummel Darren Rovell with it save it for the next time you want to deep-fry some soft-shell crabs, or put it in the trash.

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A drunken Goldman Sachs employee, apparently angry over both his job and his dissolving marriage, started shouting racial slurs at a black couple yesterday evening in the West Village yesterday, before he was knocked out cold by a man who was trying to help him.

The unidentified man was passing a black couple eating at a burrito shop shortly before 6 P.M. when he stumbled into their table. Douglas Reddish, 25, tried to help the man regain his balance, when the drunken man lashed out at him.

“This nigger wants to fight me!” police say the drunken man yelled. "You niggers are why I lost my job."

Reddish then clocked the racist, drunken man.

The man then fell back and smacked his head on the pavement, knocking him out.

“He was out cold. I thought he was dead,” said a worker at the burrito place. Reddish, seeing the extent of the injuries to the unconscious, drunk, racist man, fled the scene, only to be arrested a few minutes later by police and charged with assault.

The drunk, racist Goldman Sachs employee remains in serious condition.

The third victim of the Asiana Airlines flight that crashed in San Francisco last weekend has been revealed as Liu Yipeng. The sixteen-year-old was traveling to the same summer camp as the other two victims of the crash. She died Friday morning after being in critical condition since the accident.

I think this is art, but in the words of its singer, I'm so confused. Ola Ray starred with Michael Jackson in the "Thriller" video 30 years ago. In the time since, she appeared in bit parts on shows whose titles were punctuated with exclamation marks like Gimme a Break! and What's Happening Now!, had her drug arrest profiled on A Current Affair and successfully sued Jackson's estate for royalties. Jackson died over four years ago, and Ray has just gotten around to paying tribute to him. The project would be an ignorable clinging to past glory were it not utterly unhinged.

There is cartoon smoke, a blue-screened bedroom secreting magenta, the Sheldon High School Dance Troop painted like zombies so half-heartedly they were perhaps painted by zombies. There is a dance breakdown mimicking the one in "Thriller," in case you don't remember it but especially if you do. "I remember," Ola reminds us constantly in a voice that is part slinky, part primal screamy and, entirely out of tune. There is Ola Ray in a feathery mask driving a convertible, walking down the street in a translucent dress, wearing a sequined top in a forest while she remembers some more. Images from "Thriller" sporadically flash on the screen. "Did you know that you made me scream when you did what you did to me?" she sings at one point. He did. He heard her when he turned into a werewolf (i.e. what he did to her).

With incompetence and absurdity combining to create something so original it's amazing, this is the Showgirls 2 of music videos. "Thank God for giving me the strength to complete this project," reads Ray's message at the end of the video's credits (this video has credits). Indeed. Thank God.

The New York Times spent a year following around female University of Pennsylvania students and came to the shocking conclusion that college-aged women not only have casual sex, but they also like it. Except when they don't. Women, amirite?

The piece examines the trials and tribulations of female students navigating university hookup culture, and it reads a little like I Am Charlotte Simmons, minus the painfully-written sex scenes. There's a girl who has it all together academically and professionally, but only engages in fuck buddy-type relationships because of her “cost-benefit analyses of the low risk and low investment costs of hooking up." (Caity: "Either in Wharton or desperate for people to think she is.")

There's also the girl whose virginity became a hinderance, so she picked a nice boy, lost it, and found out that that was the end of their relationship. Plus the girl who actually likes traditional dating relationships and is thinking about saving her virginity for marriage.

So, you know, college-aged women sort of fall on a spectrum. Who knew?

As ridiculous as some of the conclusions of the article are — college women want careers now! They don't want to get married until their late twenties! No one knows what an MRS degree is anymore! — the piece does touch on the central role that alcohol plays in these casual hookups, which is a deeper issue that often goes overlooked in these college-hookup-culture trend stories.

One girl, Haley, recounted a night she got heavily intoxicated and had a "difmo" (dance-floor make-out) with a boy from her floor. He took her to his room and, as she "drifted in and out of consciousness," had sex with her.

She woke up with her head spinning. The next day, not sure what to think about what had happened, she described the night to her friends as though it were a funny story: I was so drunk, I fell asleep while I was having sex! She played up the moment in the middle of the night when the guy’s roommate poked his head in the room and asked, “Yo, did you score?”

The problem is compounded by the fact that many of these women consciously choose to get drunk in order to feel comfortable casually hooking up. The Times found that Penn women "universally" reported that they wouldn't be hooking up without alcohol, because they were "for the most part too uncomfortable to pair off with men they did not know well without being drunk." One woman said that she often gave oral sex because "by the time she got back to a guy’s room, she was starting to sober up and didn’t want to be there anymore," and a blow job was an easy way to wrap things up and leave.

And therein lies the problem.

It's true that this generation is developing differently from previous generations — twenty-somethings are putting their careers first, getting married later, and having children later than ever before — and the hook-up culture that has largely displaced the traditional dating culture allows the focus to rest on building a career, as opposed to building a family. But as much as the Times wants to proclaim, "Sex On Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too," many of these women, especially the ones who can't hook up without alcohol, don't appear to be enjoying themselves.

Interestingly, the more money a college student has, the more likely they are to casually hook up. Laura Hamilton, a professor at the University of California, Merced conducted a recent study that found that the women from wealthier backgrounds were "much more likely to hook up, more interested in postponing adult responsibilities and warier of serious romantic commitment than their less-affluent classmates," whereas less-privileged students look at those drinking, hooking-up classmates as "immature."

[NYT, image via Shutterstock]

A few months ago, the Iowa Supreme Court made the surprising decision that women can be fired from their jobs for being too attractive, regardless if they've engaged in activity that compromises their job performance.

Melissa Nelson, a thirty-three year old dental assistant from Fort Dodge, was fired after the dentist she worked for, Dr. James Knight, believed that she was too tempting to be kept around the office, lest he decide to sleep with her. Because Nelson would be totally into it, obviously.

After filing an appeal of the Supreme Court's decision, Nelson was once again rebuffed by the all-male bench, which found "that bosses can fire employees that they and their spouses see as threats to their marriages."

The court found that Nelson was legally fired “because of the activities of her consensual personal relationship.” These activities included text messages between her and her employer that were not found to be flirtatious or leading in any way.

So, beautiful employees of Iowa beware! You can totally be fired for just looking like your aesthetically pleasing selves.

Hell hath no fury like an apartment scorched.

Whitney Holmes, now charged with aggravated arson and domestic battery, found a great way to get even with her (ex?) boyfriend after an argument — she set his couch on fire and eventually almost burned down his whole building.

Dozens of residents were forced to evacuate the Chicago South Shore apartment building, and the scene eventually drew more than 80 firefighters and EMS responders. The blaze took over an hour to contain and six people (including a child) were hospitalized with injuries, but the woman's 24-year-old boyfriend will probably remember to do the damn dishes now.

[via, photo via Shutterstock]

A bottle containing a 10-year-old's message to the world was found more than a decade after it was thrown into the ocean, and just over two years after the young woman died. The bottle was found by workers during clean-up from Hurricane Sandy.

"Be excellent to yourself dude," was what New York City resident Sidonie Fery wrote in the ginger ale bottle, a line from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Fery died in 2010 after an accident while studying in Switzerland.

The bottle was found in Patchogue, Long Island, only a mile or two from where Fery had thrown the bottle into the Great South Bay. Workers cleaning up debris after Hurricane Sandy found the bottle and the note, and because it had Fery's New York City phone number, were able to deliver the message to Fery's mother.

The town of Patchogue is now honoring Fery with a plaque commemorating her life.

"It's unbelievable," Fery's mother said of the commemoration. "The town is amazing, my daughter was a lovely and lively person and very fun, she would do fun things. She always brought joy to everybody no matter how she felt."

[Associated Press]

George Zimmerman has been found not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin.

After almost two days of deliberations, the all-female jury found George Zimmerman not guilty of murder or manslaughter, a lesser charge that had been considered by the jury. Zimmerman shot and killed teenager Trayvon Martin while a part of the neighborhood watch in Sanford, Florida. Martin was unarmed when he was shot and killed by Zimmerman.

Martin had gone out for some iced tea and some Skittles when he was shot by Zimmerman, who claimed he acted out of self-defense.

Updates:

10:43 P.M.: "I think the prosecution of George Zimmerman was disgraceful," said one of his lawyers, Don West, in a press conference right now. "I'm grateful that the jury didn't make this travesty into a tragedy."

"We proved George Zimmerman is not guilty," West continued. West is in an apparently relieved, joyful mood, and says that Zimmerman is feeling "good."

"It was a little David and Goliath, but we won," his other lawyer Mark O'Mara said.

10:48 P.M.: O'Mara is cracking jokes with his co-prosecutor and the collected press is finding a good amount of humor in the proceedings.

"We will see how many civil proceedings will come out of this fiasco," O'Mara says, referring to further trials.

10:52 P.M.: "George Zimmerman would have never been tried by Florida if he was a black man," O'Mara just said. "If he was black, those people who would have decided to make him a scapegoat would not have."

10:54 P.M.:

PHOTO: George Zimmerman is congratulated by his legal team following the not-guilty verdict. pic.twitter.com/nK1Q8bLzVw

— CP24 (@CP24) July 14, 2013

11:06 P.M.: "You made Zimmerman into a monster," O'Mara tells the media, then leaves the podium.

11:15 P.M.: The Martin family attorney, Ben Crump has taken the podium:

"We are very saddened by the jury's verdict. The family is heartbroken. Sabrina Fulton and Tracy Martin would like to thank people around the world for their support. To everybody that put their hoodies up. To everybody that said, "I am Trayvon.

To Tracy and Sabrina, your tireless work. We know Trayvon is up there, proud. This morning, Martin Luther King's daughter Tweeted me that this was a defining moment for the progress of her father's dream. He would want us to conduct ourselves on the higher plane of dignity and discipline.

For Trayvon to rest in peace, we must all be peaceful."

11:21 P.M.: Trayvon's father has tweeted his reaction to the verdict.

God blessed Me & Sybrina with Tray and even in his death I know my baby proud of the FIGHT we along with all of you put up for him GOD BLESS

— Tracy Martin (@BTraymartin9) July 14, 2013

CNN immediately cut to an interview with a African American child who was outside the courthouse after the verdict came in.

He said he had come to witness "justice" and was obviously confused by what just happened.

Tonight a Florida man’s acquittal for hunting and killing a black teenager who was armed with only a bag of candy serves as a Rorschach test for the American public. For conservatives, it’s a triumph of permissive gun laws and a victory over the liberal media, which had been unfairly rooting for the dead kid all along. For liberals, it's a tragic and glaring example of the gaps that plague our criminal justice system. For people of color, it’s a vivid reminder that we must always be deferential to white people, or face the very real chance of getting killed.

When I was junior in college in Virginia, my then-girlfriend and I decided one night to meet up for a quick snack while studying for midterms. We bought some sandwiches at a 24-hour deli and, rather than waste time going to either of our homes, which were in opposite directions, we decided to eat in her car in a parking lot near a fancy hotel off-campus. We were listening to music and laughing about something when I saw a security guard’s headlights in the rear view mirror, and I stopped laughing as I watched him—a white man in his mid-40s—walk up to my girlfriend’s door and ask her to step out of the car. “Uh, OK,” she said, clearly as confused as I was about what we’d done to warrant his attention.

He walked her away from her car toward his, but they were close enough that I could hear their conversation. He asked her her name, a slight southern lilt lengthening his vowels. She told him. Then he said, “Are you OK? “

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Are you safe right now?” he asked again.

My girlfriend was white. I am not.

I leapt out of the car and screamed, “What the hell did you just ask her?” I wanted to see if he had the resolve to say it again, to me this time.

The security guard turned to face me. “It’s standard procedure, sir,” he said. “I was going to ask you if you were alright, too.”

“I think you’re lying,” I said.

“You can think what you’d like,” he said, a smile creeping up his face. “We can also call the police right now and sort this all out, because y’all aren’t supposed to be here and this is private property.”

I wanted to hit him in his fucking face. I wanted to take his flashlight from his belt and smash his teeth out, giving him a real reason to call the cops, a reason besides the crime of eating a sandwich in a parking lot.

But I was a 20-year-old brown kid in Virginia. It was late. I was with a white girl. I felt embarrassed, and the thought of being surrounded by more inquisitive white men with pepper spray and tasers and handcuffs and guns only made my face hotter. And so I apologized. “I’m sorry,” I said. “We didn’t know this was private property.”

“Well, now you know,” he said.

My girlfriend drove me home, where I stewed for hours and promised myself I’d report the guard in the morning. When I woke, however, I realized I didn’t have the guard’s name, nor did I even know what to report—it’s not against any rules to ask a white woman if the black man in the car with her is attacking her. It’s not against any rules to humiliate someone in a darkened parking lot in front of the person they love. It may, however, be against the rules to eat food in the parking lot in the first place. I never reported it. I think about it to this day.

It is a complicated thing to be young, black, and male in America. Not only are you well aware that many people are afraid of you—you can see them clutching their purses or stiffening in their subway seats when you sit across from them—you must also remain conscious of the fact that people expect you to be apologetic for their fear. It’s your job to be remorseful about the fact that your very nature makes them uncomfortable, like a pilot having to apologize to a fearful flyer for being in the sky.

If you’re a black man and you don’t remain vigilant of and obsequious to white people’s panic in your presence—if you, say, punch a man who accosts you during dinner with your girlfriend and screams “Nigger!” in your face, or if you, say, punch a man who is following you without cause in the dark with a handgun at his side—then you must be prepared to be arrested, be beaten, be shot through the heart and lung and die on the way home to watch a basketball game with your family. And after you are dead, other blacks should be prepared for people to say you are a vicious thug who deserved it. You smoked weed, for instance, and got in some fights at school (like I did)—obviously you had it coming. You were a ticking time bomb, and sooner or later someone was going to have to put you down.

To stay alive and out of jail, brown and black kids learn to cope. They learn to say, “Sorry, sir,” for having sandwiches in the wrong parking lot. They learn, as LeVar Burton has, to remove their hats and sunglasses and put their hands up when police pull them over. They learn to tolerate the indignity of strange, drunken men approaching them and calling them and their loved ones a bunch of niggers. They learn that even if you’re willing to punch a harasser and face the consequences, there’s always a chance a police officer will come to arrest you, put you face down on the ground, and then shoot you execution style. Maybe the cop who shoots you will only get two years in jail, because it was all a big misunderstanding. You see, he meant to be shooting you in the back with his taser.

Trayvon Martin is dead—and so many young men like him are dead or in prison—because in America it was his responsibility to take it. It was his responsibility to let a stranger with a gun follow him at night in his own neighborhood and suspect him of wrongdoing. It was his responsibility to apologize for being a black kid who scared people. It was not George Zimmerman’s responsibility to let a boy get home to his family.

For me, this was going to come down to whether white women saw themselves as white first or women first. I've gotten my answer.

Minorities & women are seen as being complicit in their own injuries in ways that white men aren't. Trayvon Martin was followed at night by a stranger, ends up being killed, and debate ensues about the part he played in the situation. Much like how women are raped and debate ensues over the role she played in her own sexual assault. What did she wear? Was she drinking? You'd think that a female jury would be able to relate to the predicament Trayvon was in as well as the post-incident smearing. But alas, they sided with their fear of black males over empathy for being held to account for your own victimization. Interesting.

"Only in America can a dead black boy go on trial for his own murder."
- Syreeta McFadden

Flashback: The day Rep. Bobby Rush got kicked off the floor of the House of Representatives for wearing a hoodie in honor of Trayvon Martin.

There are millions of George Zimmermans in this country. Safe people, white people, don't realize this. Black people, minorities, live with it on a daily basis.

George Zimmerman's brother, Robert, appeared on CNN this evening to discuss with Piers Morgan what the Zimmerman family has gone through after George Zimmerman killed (but did not murder) 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

"I want to know if it's true, and I don't know if it's true, that Trayvon Martin was looking to procure firearms, or growing marijuana, or looking to make lean," he told Piers Morgan and Don Lemon.

Robert Zimmerman then went on to discuss George's mentoring of two young black children, and how committed he is, and remains, to public service.