ABSTRACT
On February 26, 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman—who thought the teenager looked suspicious—sparking a national outrage and discussion about race in the United States. Why had an innocent, unarmed African American teenager died on his way home? In the aftermath, some sought answers not in explicit racism and prejudice, but rather in the domain of implicit racism—arguing, as two social psychologists wrote in an op-ed (newspaper opinion piece), that “our minds are colored by race” (Goff & Richardson, 2012).
