Californian activists call for Day of Outrage against racism

Activists in the US State of California have declared Tuesday as a Day of Outrage to voice their anger at racially-motivated shootings in America. “Rally! Speak Out! March! We are all Trayvon Martin! The whole system is guilty!” a statement by Oakland community activists read on Monday. “The murder of Trayvon Martin stings. It is an outrage on top of countless outrages…Fight the Power and Transform the People for Revolution!” the statement added. Martin, a 17-year-old African-American teenager, was shot dead on February 26 by the neighborhood watch guard George Zimmerman. Outrage has risen among African-American communities across the United States as more black American citizens fall victim to suspicious and apparently racially-motivated shootings. Early on Friday, five people were shot, three of them killed, in a black neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in a spree that left residents on edge and sparked an intensive manhunt. Two white Americans have confessed to the shootings. Meanwhile, African-American filmmaker Tyler Perry recently said he was racially profiled by two white officers during a traffic stop in Atlanta. The suspected racial motivations surrounding these cases have sparked numerous protests across the US in recent weeks. According to a recent Gallup survey, 73 percent of African Americans believe that Zimmerman, who is white, would already have been arrested had the victim been white, not black. This is while only 33 percent of white Americans hold such an opinion.