The other day, I wrote about still not being sure what Trayvon Martin was supposed to do that night in Florida, when a strange man who turned out to have a gun was following him. A number of commenters asked why he couldn’t have just called 911. And said what? I am a young black man, walking through a gated community, and someone seems to think I don’t belong? Would they have sent a squad car, or told him to stay inside and be less visible—less of a citizen? Maybe that would have led to a sequence of events that kept him alive (or maybe not), but, as Obama recognized, it is not good enough for our country.

Some commentators asked, afterward, if Obama was putting himself in the middle of a case where he didn’t belong. But his voice does belong in it, as many more voices do. Messages about not belonging have haunted this case from the beginning. When the police found Trayvon Martin’s dead body, they at first accepted not only that he didn’t belong in the neighborhood but that he didn’t belong anywhere, or with anyone; his parents had to come looking for him the next day, after an night of uncertainty, only to be pointed to his body. But he belonged anywhere in America, as the teen-ager he was and the adult he could have been