Trayvon Martin's stepmother Alicia Stanley wants you to know: "I exist... I'm the one... I'm the one...."

You don't see her at the trial where the biological mother sits with the biological father, and she's not the "father's fiancee" whose residence was near where the shooting took place, but she sees herself as Trayvon's real mother.

I don't know who made the decision to keep her in the background. Perhaps the Martin family's lawyers thought there were already too many mother figures in the Trayvon story and decided she should be eclipsed. If so, they should have worked harder to obtain her cooperation, because, as you'll see in the interview — here — she feels aggrieved. She wanted her time in the spotlight, and I'd be interested in knowing the details of the decision of the Anderson Cooper show to put her on. There's a "woman shunned" quality to much of what she says, and I suspect other news shows determined that it's too women's television or too outside the racial justice template.

If you have limited time, begin with Part 2, where Stanley — asked if she thinks Zimmerman "zeroed in" on Martin because of his race — says "I'd be lying if I said yes, so I'm going to say this: no." From there, she goes on to her "I exist... I'm the one... I'm the one..." monologue, which is quite dramatic. I felt like I was watching the Halle Berry performance in the role of Alicia Stanley. I wonder if she had this part scripted in advance and what we see on screen is acting.

I mean, she seems to be saying her lines in the fashion that actresses use when they are bidding for an Oscar, but those actresses are purporting to represent real people. Alicia Stanley may be exactly the kind of real person that actresses will want to study in order to give Oscar-worthy performances. Most real people — like the various witnesses I'd watched in the trial — speak in a rather flat and matter-of-fact style when they're invited to speak on television. You just know that if they made a movie out of this trial, the actors would have to punch up the emotion. Which is why I loathe most courtroom scenes: To avoid blandness, they've got to be phony.

But Alicia Stanley isn't a witness in the courtroom, she's a guest in the comfortable gaze of Anderson Cooper. She's not under oath, but maybe she's utterly genuine. Consider that line: "I'd be lying if I said yes, so I'm going to say this: no." Who answers like that instead of just saying no? A person who consciously and actively decides that not only shouldn't she lie, but she's got to be honest even about considering lying.