“Thank you for the apology,” Tracy Martin told Rivera. “Your apology is accepted. Let me just add one thing with the wearing of the hoodie. I don’t think America knows that, in fact, at the time of the incident when he initially made the call, it was raining. So Trayvon had every right to have on his hood. He was protecting himself from the rain. So if being a suspicious, walking in the rain with your hoodie on is a crime, then i guess the world is doing something wrong.”
Earlier in the interview, Rivera asked Martin whether he was worried the controversy over his son’s death was being split upon racial lines. “Do you worry at all, Tracy, that this case has divided the nation with black people overwhelmingly on one side and many, many white people on the other?”
“I don’t look at it like that at all,” Martin responded. “This isn’t a race issue. This is an issue about what is right and what is wrong.”
Rivera’s comments last week drew rebukes from many people, perhaps most notably his own son.
On Tuesday, Rivera told Politico that he felt his remarks distracted from the larger issues.
‘I apologize to anyone offended by what one prominent black conservative called my very practical and potentially life-
saving campaign urging black and Hispanic parents not to let their children go around wearing hoodies,’ Rivera said in an email to POLITICO Tuesday.
Watch Rivera’s apology below via Fox News: