Sixteen months ago in a gated Sanford, Fla., community patrolled by a zealous, jittery and armed volunteer neighborhood watchman who felt threatened by the mere presence of an “unfamiliar” black kid walking alone, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin died on a sidewalk of a single gunshot to the chest.   

 SATURDAY JUNE 1: A fight during a kindergarten graduation ceremony in Cleveland today made national news. The brawl broke out after refreshments were spilled, which is exactly what the little kids had spent the past year learning you aren’t supposed to do.  

Greek yogurt production — a $2 billion industry that continues to grow — produces acid whey runoff unlike normal yogurt production that is killing mass aquatic life by sucking the oxygen out of streams and rivers. WORLD -2     

It all started, as it always does, with fried chicken. Offenders reducing a black man’s identity to a deflated stereotype — especially one boiling down to food — have usually felt like the oppressed in their own lives because they are losers on some level; they cannot quite reach that elusive gold ring of accomplishment.   

 Though Norwood is merely five miles north of downtown’s city center, it may as well be smack dab in another time and another place with its barely-there lane lines, its shameful-but-glaring classism and racism for a city its size and its perpetually broke and broke-down demeanor.  

It’s 2013 already. The rate at which calendar pages blow past means there’s not enough time to school you on the ever titillating suffixal differences — which are also cultural and racial — between the -er and the -a. White folks want to say the word soooo badly it’s funny.    

I was a ripe, sitting target for a bully when I entered the fourth grade at Heritage Hill Elementary School in Springdale: I was a shy 9-year-old; my single mother was settling her three kids after abruptly leaving our father and bouncing about in a station wagon.   

There is a lot wrong in the brutal beating of Pat Mahaney, a 45-year-old white man, by six black teenagers in North College Hill. Sadly and somehow brilliantly, this is a teachable moment about to pass us all by if we don’t start grappling with and then telling some truths.