When I was in high school, I had my own Trayvon Martin moment.

A few friends and I were walking back from getting our haircuts at the closest barbershop. For those of you that don’t know me, I attended a private boarding school (Milton Academy) in Massachusetts and as such my friends and I all lived on campus. The problem? In order to get back to school, we had to walk through an all-white neighborhood full of multi-million dollar homes. And apparently having two black kids and a Muslim kid walking through that neighborhood was enough reason for a resident to call the police.

The cops found us really quickly, too. We hadn’t walked more than a few blocks before we got stopped on our walk home by a police cruiser. We had no drugs on us; no cigarettes; no alcohol; no weapons; no nothing. To my recollection, none of us were wearing hoodies (shout out to my homie Geraldo). In fact, there was nothing suspicious about us at all. Do you want to know the only way we got out of that situation? By name-dropping the private school we went to.

That wasn’t the first Trayvon Martin moment I had when I was in high school; it was actually the second. The first Trayvon Martin moment had my friends and I getting kicked out of a convenience store because they mistook us for being kids from the local black neighborhood (this one made the news and shut down a local convenience store). And then there was another Trayvon moment before I graduated high school. When I was in college, I had three separate Trayvon Martin moments. And I was only there for two years!

I could go on and on, but I don’t think you’ll be shocked when I tell you that just three weeks ago I had my most recent Trayvon Martin moment. The players were different, but the feeling was the same. I got stopped by some cops in a cruiser as I was walking home late one night from work. I live and work in the Financial District in San Francisco. The 8 minute walk home is nice and short; this time around, it wasn’t. Despite my lack of a hoodie (I was wearing a blazer, a t-shirt, and a fedora), the cops still chose to shine their headlights on me and ask me where I was going and what my business was there. After asking me for my ID and grilling me for five minutes, they probably decided I was who I said I was and not worth the trouble; so they let me go.

I’m 32 years old and still having my Trayvon Martin moments.

There’s been a lot of talk back and forth about Zimmerman’s guilt or innocence. Frankly, I think everyone is missing the point. I have no idea of his guilt under the eyes of the law. What I do know is this: if I had been the one to shoot Trayvon, I would have been arrested and charged while they conducted a proper investigation. If it so happened some evidence cropped up during the investigation to prove my innocence, then maybe they would have dropped the charges on me. How do I know this? Because I can’t even walk home at the age of 32 without getting stopped by the police. I wonder how many of my non-Black friends can say the same? Until we address the issue of the inherent inequality of treatment, then we’re all completely missing the point.

I could trot out all kinds of statistics on the inequality of it all. However, I think you should all just watch Larry Willmore of the Daily Show. He makes a very solid point when he mentions that Plaxico Burress got arrested for two years for having his gun accidentally go off in his pants and yet nothing happens in the case of Trayvon. Because Black men do not get the benefit of the doubt.

And as a side note to my rant I have something to say to the New Black Panther Party, Spike Lee, and all of the others out there putting bounties on George Zimmerman’s head: stop it. We cannot get anywhere in this world by answering ignorance with more ignorance and violence with more violence. We don’t know if the man is guilty of breaking the law or not, but you guys are certainly not helping.

I want George Zimmerman charged. I want an investigation to happen. I want black men to stop getting shot in the street for walking through white neighborhoods. I want the pall of suspicion that hangs over my head as I go through my public life to disappear. I want racial profiling to stop. But most importantly, I want my future children to not have to think about whether or not authority figures are there to help them or not. I stopped trusting the police during my sophomore year of high school. Now I have to watch out for the neighborhood watch? Something has to be done before we have a whole generation of black kids that grow up believing their public servants aren’t there to serve them; they’re just there to serve white people. Based upon my personal experience (and that of the Martin family), they’d be justified in thinking that.

And that’s the sad part.