Picking out the relevant parts of Hellified's post:
On the contrary, I think most white people have been inundated with the matter of what Black People Think About the World. I don't deny that some people can shut it out, like the people you mention who have no problem with reporting black people for the Crime of Being Black. But it's one thing to say "Black People Think X," and another thing to say, "Black People are Correct About Everything." In the case of Zimmerman, I wouldn't have minded seeing him do some jail-time for manslaughter. But a lot of people, not exclusively blacks, wanted to treat Zimmerman's act as murder in the first degree, which it clearly was not. Why did the District Attorney overcharge Zimmerman? I can't think of any reason except to mollify the extremists by subscribing to their narrative-- and so Zimmerman did no time, because it was important to the extremists' narrative to call him a murderer.
Zimmerman did no time because florida's laws are screwed up. Manslaughter was added to the charge just before jury deliberation but unlike some states florida doesn't recognize it. So a defendant can try to reduce a murder charge to manslaughter by saying that he acted in self-defense even while conceding that he made a mistake. Alternatively, imperfect self-defense can offer prosecutors a chance at a guilty verdict when it doesn't seem a jury would convict on murder. Without imperfect self-defense then whats left is a crime scene where two people had a conflict and the only story any can go on is the person left alive.
Because florida doesn't have imperfect self-defense, the jury could only decide on the evidence in front of them..even tho MOST of them agree after the case that zimmerman was completely at fault in that incident.
Are you going back in history now? There were some official laws on the books, like laws against racial intermarriage, but by and large most of the strategies used to oppress black people were not laws, but customs. There was no law on the books that said, "Whites ought to lynch blacks every once in a while to keep them in line." It was a custom, however repugnant, that white people evolved "off the books." While you can argue that the lynched man doesn't care whether he was killed by law or by custom, it makes a difference to us now, or at least to anyone answering the oversimple claim that racism is systemic. On the contrary, the law's claim to be rational and non-partisan is the black American's only weapon against the chauvinism of custom.
It makes a difference to YOU and people like YOU...to the rest of us it makes not one micron of a difference.
Also look up pig laws or vagrancy laws and even jim crow laws and see just how much was actually codified.
But regardless thats why the word de facto exists.. not in law but in fact and when a sheriff goes by it or a judge or city elders/council and any official/elected body uses the custom over whats in the books it may as well BE the law.
On a related topic, I put it to everyone here: have you ever seen a black person prosecuted for having simply been in the presence of a white child? I've seen a lot of false crimes attributed to black people over the years, not least being the sin of being in the company of adult white women. But this idea from "black-ish," picturing black men as pedophiles, is an idea I don't really think is widespread, and I suspect the show's writers made it up out of whole cloth. However, if anyone has a specific example of a pedophile prosecution, feel free to roll it out.
Clearly that was made up to illustrate a point of why black men may feel or behave or react in a situation based on awareness of they would be perceived.
But if you want a real life situation that close to that...
In 1916, white men in Cedarbluff, Mississippi, lynched Jeff Brown because he accidentally bumped into a white girl while running to catch a train.
First youd have to be talking about some recent event like within the last 40 years because if a black man was accused of doing anything to a white female prior to that regardless of age he's be killed flat out (see above )
Second looking for a specific case of a false charge of pedophilia with black men is a bit ridiculous when the crux of the issue of that story as how a threat to white females is used as excuse to persecute/prosecute black men. There was a specific reason they chose a little white girl rather than a little white boy.
But you know this already.