[QUOTE=mhendo]
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.
[/QUOTE]
And you might very well be right. I was never trying to state it as fact, I guess it was just an impression that I had because of my experiences growing up. Like Rigamarole I grew up in a very heavily black neighborhook and had experiences not unlike his on a number of occasions growing up. I was never assaulted and those kinds of things eventually stopped as I grew older but it stayed with me. I don’t think that it had any decidedly negative affects on me as my best friend from high school is black and is my current housemate, but I tend to notice those cases more so than other ones. I will try to refrain from making unsubstantiated claims in the future.