The national media has moved on from race crimes. Now it is missing blondes or hot teachers screwing students. Race crimes are so 1990’s.
Well, noted idiot and poor director Spike Lee has said that black people cannot be racists- I forget the explanation for the statement though.
Neither have I. Had the victims been black, Jewish, Muslim, gay, asian, etc; I’d expect the national news to grab it and run. I’d even expect to see it on BBC.
Perhaps this?
I’m interested in what others think about the hate crime issue. I’m personally against the idea of hate crime laws. For one thing I don’t think they will be fairly applied across the board if the victim is white, but mostly because I don’t like the idea of “criminal thought”. If the laws are on the books though they need to be enforced no matter what the color of the victims.
From Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mardis_Gras_Race_Riots%2C_Seattle%2C_WA
I have to agree, this story wasn’t carried much in the national news. I hadn’t really noticed since I mostly don’t watch the news. In Googling Long Beach Hate Crime, the first five pages only show stories by the LA Times, the Washington Post and all local SoCal papers and TV stations. I wouldn’t go so far as to say this shows a double standard in race related crime, but for whatever reason this story didn’t seem to get much national attention.
And they’d be right. Every media organisation is biased. Some subtly, some not so subtly. Some are biased politically, others are biased towards their owners.
You get the “distinct feeling” or you have actual evidence that this is the case? Are you pitting a hypothetical?
There are plenty of people who think no one should be charged with hate crimes. Oddly enough, I’d bet there is a strong correlation between those people and people who are ranting that this isn’t getting enough coverage.
The most odd thing about all of these complaints is that the hero of the story was black. Should I pit the media for downplaying a story where the hero is black, and maybe get a “distinct feeling” that if the hero had been white it would have been the hot-topic in every media outlet in the land?
That was definitely a game/set/match post.
and
Well, speaking for myself only, i’m a political lefty, and i tend to be opposed to hate crime legislation, even though i understand the very real historical circumstances and current discrimination that impels such legislation.
Fundamentally, i believe that if people commit criminal acts, we should punish those acts. I really don’t think it is wise to spend too much time speculating on what type of hatred and prejudice—if any—may or may not have been going through the perpetrator’s head at the time of the criminal act. Much as i loathe the type of hatred that some people carry around with them, we shouldn’t be criminalizing thought.
The law already allows a certain amount of speculation about the offender’s state of mind, when it contemplates issues such as premeditation. Personally, i think that if someone commits an unprovoked and premeditated attack on someone else, then that is, in itself, a heinous enough crime to merit a significant sentence. It shouldn’t matter whether or not the criminal had some racial or gender or other phobia bouncing around in his head at the time.
We’ve debated hate crime issues here before, most notably (in my memory, at least) in the very long GD thread about the murder of trans-gender teenager Gwen Araujo. As i said in that thread, the crime itself (strangling and then beating the person to death) was “so heinous that, IMO, no possible ‘hate crime’ legislation should be necessary in order for them to spend the rest of their lives behind bars.”
For me, the whole issue of enforcing hate crime legislation is so fraught with problems and potential inconsistencies that we’re better off focusing on the acts themselves. Of course, what we also need to do is make sure that the law doesn’t allow ridiculous loopholes that have the potential to let these animals get away with what they do.
For example, the defendants in the Matthew Sheppard case in Wyoming put forward what has since been called the “gay panic” defense, the idea being that they were so freaked out by Sheppard’s homosexuality that they lost their minds and killed him. Personally, i think if we’re going to get rid of hate crime laws (which we should), we should also state unequivocally that the simple fact of someone’s difference (their race, their sexuality, their politics, their gender, whatever) is NEVER, under any circumstances, an excuse for assaulting that person or a mitigation of the severity of the crime.
Just MHO.
I wasn’t trying to stereotype as much as point out that there is often a correlation between the two. Much like saying there is a strong correlation between voting Democrat and being pro-choice. Plenty of pro-life Dems out there, and plenty of pro-choice types who vote Republican, but the correlation still exists.
Absolutely.
A lot of my lefty friends support hate crime legislation and hate speech laws. And i think they generally do so with good reasons and good intentions. I just happen to disagree with them, for the reasons noted above.
I didn’t say that nobody should be charged with hate crimes, I was saying that hate crime legislation should be applied evenly across the board regardless of the race of the perpetrator.
(Which it would appear, is being done in this case, even though there are some people in Long Beach protesting it)
You also said you get the distinct feeling that if the races were reversed, it would be all over the national airwaves. I asked if you had any evidence of that?
I don’t think it’s exactly something I could post a cite for, it’s just an opinion I have based on my previous experiences.
Like?
Things like Tawana Brawley, the Duke rape case, and the dragging death of a black man in I think it was Jasper, TX a number of years back.
A gang-rape accusation, a gang-rape accusation, and a horrendous murder. How exactly do these compare to the LA story, which as shown, has actually gotten plenty of attention for an assault? Gang assaults are pretty damned common, and very rarely get the amount of attention that the Long Beach attacks have received.
Five Charged in Queens Pool Hall Gang Assault
Gang of six allegedly involved in assault
Juveniles charged with gang assault for attacking man
I had never heard of any of these and there are plenty more like them. The Long Beach story is getting plenty of “play”, and also has shown to have “legs”, far more than typical for these types of attacks.
Yes, but it doesn’t appear that race plays a very large factor in any of the links you just cited. I’m not so focused on the gang assault aspect of it as the race aspect of it.
And therein lies the problem in trying to make simplistic comparisons among stories like this.
The Tawana Brawley case, for example, was a case of alleged kidnapping, holding hostage and multiple rape, and in the original story some of the perpetrators were alleged to be police officers.
Not only that, but the case got as much (if not more) attention in the media for the inconsistencies in Brawley’s story as for the original crime. That is, while the press did report and devote considerable attention to the original story of white-on-black crime, it devoted even more time and column inches to the collapse of the case and the problems with Brawley’s allegations.
I think it says something about the case and its media existence that, if you mention Tawana Brawley nowdays, the first reaction of most people is, “Isn’t that the woman who lied about being kidnapped and raped?”
The Duke case certainly received plenty of attention, although it seemed to me that the category of analysis in that story was as much “class” as it was “race.” The media made as much about the discrepancies in levels of wealth and privilege as about race in the case. Of course, in America, any discussions about class and race inevitably overlap, and it can sometimes be difficult to extricate one from the other.
Also, and tying into the same issue, was the fact that the students were from an expensive private university. They were also on a sporting team. Like it or not, that sort of shit is grist to the mill for journalists. And i really think that if the athletes had been black Duke basketballers, and the woman had been white, the story would have received similar attention in the media.
As for the James Bird case, you do understand, i assume, the difference between a fairly simple assault (the Long Beach case), on the one hand, and tying a conscious man to the back of a pick-up truck and dragging him until he’s a mutilated corpse, on the other?
I’m not trying to minimize the brutality or the unacceptability of the Long Beach case. What happened to those victims was awful, there is no excuse for it, and i hope that whomever did it gets properly punished. I’m simply trying to point out that it’s very difficult to make a direct comparison with the cases you cite. All of those cases had certain particular characteristics that gave them national prominence.
Also, on a more general level, while i think it’s laudable to pursue an ideal of perfectly equal media treatment irrespective of race, the fact is that news reporting and popular perceptions of events like this are laden down with history. Sure, slavery and lynchings and officially-sanctioned segregation are in the past, but the fact that they’re in the past doesn’t mean that they don’t still hold cultural meaning. While ten white men assaulting three black women might be objectively just as reprehensible as ten black men assaulting three white women, and while each incident might do equal damage to the victims, the fact is that racism against blacks has a different historical and cultural meaning than racism against whites in America.
It’s like arguing that calling a white man “cracker” is the same as calling a black man “nigger.” In some ideal world, bereft of historical memory, that would be true, but the historical weight and actions behind each of those words and their use means that they are not, in fact, equivalent.
Also, leaving aside everything i’ve written in this post, the fact is that you haven’t offered even the slightest evidence that your assertion of differential media treatment is valid. All you’ve given us is some vague feelings about what may or may not be some differences. But i’ve already shown that the Long Beach story has received considerable attention, certainly attention commensurate with its status as an assault.
Also, while it’s easy to dismiss treatment in the LA Times as merely an LA paper, the fact is that the LA Times is among the five or six most influential newspapers in America. It is one of the city-based papers that is really also a national broadsheet in terms of its news-leading influence. It’s up there with papers like the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Miami Herald, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post. Competition for space of the front pages of such a paper is intense, and it says something about the weight of this story that it has appeared on the front page no fewer than 3 times, and on the front page of the California section at least seven times.
But don’t you understand that merely looking at race isn’t enough if you’re going to claim to offer a thorough analysis of news events like this?
When news organizations decide how (or whether) to cover particular stories, they look at a whole variety of factors. I’m sure that there are racially-motivated crimes every day in the United States. In fact, according to the FBI, in 2005 there were 4,691 racially-motivated hate crimes in the United States. That’s over twelve such crimes every day—and that’s just the ones that were reported, either by the victims to the police, or the police forces to the FBI. It’s probably an absolute minimum. How many of those 4,691 cases do you think make national news?
Of the racially-motivated hate crimes reported to the FBI, 68.2% were triggered by anti-black bias, and 19.9% were triggered by anti-white bias.
If you break it down into the race of the offender and the type of bias motivation, the difference is even greater. As this table shows, there were 368 cases in which black offenders engaged in anti-white hate crimes, and 1803 cases in which white offenders engaged in anti-black hate crimes.
So, according to those statistics, whites attack blacks for reasons of racial bias about five times as often as blacks attack whites for reasons of racial bias. I’m not sure if there’s any statistical conclusion to be drawn about the propensity of either group for this type of attack; i just wanted to point out that, in absolute numbers, whites seem to attack blacks in race crimes more often than vice versa.
I can remember racially-based crimes making the national news on only a very few occasions over the past few years. The fact that we remember so vividly cases like Tawana Brawley, the Duke case, the James Bird case, etc. suggests that they are the exception, rather than the rule. For better or worse, the vast majority of racially-motivated offenses passed unnoticed at the national level, and are probably only reported in local papers and news bulletins.
I think that your allegation of a non-story is, in itself, a non-story.