"Many tweets were accompanied by the sort of pictures that could be used to tar even staid black professionals as intimidating. Brown was a large eighteen-year-old—six feet four inches, according to his mother—and, in the image that circulated in the media immediately following the shooting, his size is highlighted. He flashes a peace symbol that, in conjunction with his imposing stature, could predictably be assailed as a gang sign."

Jelani Cobb identifies something that perhaps could be ameliorated by one simple step:  conversation.  The interactions between white persons and young black males is the performance of a fear drama.  Fear suffuses every aspect of practically every encounter.  Whites fear young black males and act apprehensive, worried, and defensive.  Young black males, internalizing the exquisite humiliation of their role, inhabit the part in varying ways that usually suffice to convince white persons of the accuracy of their culturally ingrained intuition.  This doesn't mean a young black male in inhabiting the part is doing anything wrong, simply that young black males often react to white persons within the context of the fear drama, having a dearth of culturally transmitted roles available to them and choosing how to act from among them.

What can be done to change things?  Perhaps white people could talk to black teenagers and young men as if they were just teenagers and young men.  Sitting at the bus stop?  Ask a black kid what school he goes to, whether he plays sports, what television shows he likes to watch, what the music is that he is listening to, etc.  Yup, you're a goofy cracker, but so what.  The distance separating black and white is one that can be bridged by simply normalizing the human interaction and the expectations between black and white.  Someone has got to start somewhere to make things better.  Why not make it you.

"A brave man will try to make the evil stop with him.  He shall keep the blow.  No man shall get it from him, and that is a sublime ambition."  Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King.