Wow. This is the first I’ve heard of this, and I gotta say, in its combination of details (assuming they’re all proven true), it’s among the most horrible, depraved crimes I’ve heard of in a long time. Just…wow. I don’t support the dealth penalty, but I admit that reading this made me waver for a moment.
Okay. That said, a couple thoughts. First, I don’t think anyone can deny that white victims are usually given much more attention in the media. Partly it’s racism, partly it’s that audiences are more likely to be interested in and sympathetic to victims they can identify with, which would usually be middle class whites like themselves (you may consider this to be racism too; it seems a slightly different thing to me).
Second: Black criminals do get plenty of air time on the evening news as well. But even though that’s true, I think what the people forwarding this e-mail around are getting at is that very few black-on-white crimes seem to generate media-driven discussions of black criminality in the way that white-on-black crimes generate discussion of white racism (along with all the other coverage of white racism in the media). Let’s look at you with the face’s examples:
[QUOTE=you with the face]
Off the top of my head, I can only think of three big media cases about whites accused of doing bad things to blacks: Brawley, Byrd, and the whole Duke imbroglio. On the other side, we had the collossal spectacle of the OJ trial, the Kobe Bryant trial, and the Susan Smith nightmare.
[/QUOTE]
Five of those six were heavily discussed in the media in terms of white racism (the first three definitely; the Susan Smith case was very carefully not, as I remember, discussed in racial terms [even if that’s how people privately thought of it] until it came out that she’d made the whole thing up, at which point the fact that she’d blamed it on a black male opened the flood gates to a discussion of racism; the OJ trial generated tons of different discussions, though arguably the primary one was about white racism – in the LAPD, in the jury, etc.; the Kobe Bryant trial didn’t generate much racial discussion at all, as far as I’m aware). None of them, as far as I saw, generated in the mainstream media significant discussion of the fact of disproportionate black criminality. Another example: when it turned out that the Washington snipers were black, that fact received virtually no attention in the media, though, in contrast, there was much discussion of “loner white males” when the Unabomber, Tim McVeigh, and school shootings happened, as well as analysis about the Virginia Tech shooter’s ethnicity and the role it might have played in his crimes. (I was watching the news with a friend when the snipers were caught, and his first reaction was not relief that they had been caught, but worry that there would be a racist backlash!)
The impression is given that black-on-white crime cannot be analyzed and discussed as such. Even black-on-black crimes are, though often reported, seldom analyzed or willing to be seen as signs of larger problems in the community, in the way that white crimes sometimes all-too-readily are.
For some interesting stats on race and crime, check out this report from the Department of Justice (WARNING: PDF!!). Table 42 on page 55 of that document sheds some interesting light on the Duke rape case: in 2005, an astonishing 0.0 percent of rapes of black women were by white men. So clearly when it does happen, or is alleged to happen, it’s news, though maybe not in the way the media made it out to be. (Some needed caveats: that’s a statistical 0.0 percent, meaning that the sample included ten or fewer reports. Also, that table is for “single offender victimizations” – not sure where the stats are for group rapes.)