Whenever I see a headline such as Unarmed black man shot by cop I feel society taking a step backwards in the racism game.
Clearly the headline writer is sensationalizing the incident. Why else make a point of identifying the race of the victim other than to attract more readers to the story? The side effect, of course, is that the flames of racism are fanned and outrage is encouraged.
I don’t believe I have ever seen a headline where the Caucasian victim was identified by race; often not even in the story.
I know there are racist cops, just like there are racist custodians and racist morticians. But I can’t help but feel as if the media folk are, um, getting aroused whenever there is such an occurrence involving an African American victim. And if the cop happens to be white, well that there is a daily double.
If this past election has taught me anything, it’s that we REALLY need to rethink how we (and the media) are approaching race issues.
How we do that, I have no fucking clue. These questions are indeed difficult to answer.
I do still feel that racism still needs to be shine a light on. But perhaps maybe, media outlets could vet their stories a little more thoroughly before throwing out the race card.
Witness the countless idiots who still blame OBAMA for the racial division of the last 8 years. No, you reprobate crypto-Nazis, YOU are the ones who are finally being public about your belief in your racial superiority.
My issue is that this is consistently the automatic response. The cop is white. The shootee is black. Under these circumstances there seem to be many who believe it can’t possibly not be racially motivated.
And this response, I believe, does an injustice to real racism (of which there is much) and hinders progress.
mmm
So what is the role of the Justice Dept. when it investigates various police departments, and finds a pattern of injustice towards black people? Can we trust that these investigations are un-biased and objective? Do these also inflame fears of racism?
As for the media, I wonder if they really have as much effect as the OP speculates. Most people seem to have a preconceived idea of how the world of law enforcement works (either a) those young black men are up to no good and the LEO was just doing his/her job; or b) those cops are just looking for a chance to shoot a young black man even for no reason except racism). It seems to me the relatively few who try to find the objective truth* are unlikely to be swayed by headlines. For the rest, the headlines will either confirm their pre-existing opinions, or be dismissed as “typical (probably liberal) media” bias.
*Objective truth - yes, I believe there is such a thing, especially regarding a concrete event such as a shooting, no matter how hard it may be to determine. In my opinion there is a non-zero number of unjustified police shootings, as well as a non-zero number of instances where the shooting is well within best accepted police practices and would pass any objective inspection. I think finding the truth of each situation is no more difficult than it would be if such headlines didn’t exist.
While I’m all for focusing attention on racial issues, the glee with which the media clutches stories about certain minority victims (note, if a white or Asian man got shot by another minority man, it wouldn’t get one-tenth the attention than if a minority man gets shot by a white man) and dashes off to run the presses with delight is just sickening.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over the span of more than a decade, 2,151 whites died by being shot by police compared to 1,130 blacks.
So, for my speculation (about the media) to be wrong we would be seeing twice as many ‘Cop Kills White Man’ headlines than we would see ‘Cop Kills Black Man’ headlines.
That’s a good start, but until someone presents some stats on media coverage of police shootings, we remain in “speculation” territory. Also, it’s worth noting that the headline of your cite is “Police kill more whites than blacks, but minority deaths generate more outrage”, which might seem superficially unfair but it’s worth nothing that even if roughly twice as many whites are killed be police than blacks, whites overall aren’t roughly double the *number *of blacks - whites outnumber blacks in the U.S. at least five to one.
A black man is 2.5 times more likely to be killed by the police than a white man is. That’s not something you can write off as a statistical fluke. And if getting killed because of your race isn’t a form of real racism, I have a hard time imagining where you’ve set the bar.
Have you considered the possibility that police shootings for which the justification is more questionable might receive more media attention? And that unjustified shootings might be more common when the victim is Black? Because of racism, for example?
If the race of the victim is potentially the reason that a person was shot, do you really think that’s not relevant to the news story? Do you really think racism would be less of a problem if the media pretended it didn’t exist? Personally, I think it’s the opposite. Black Americans in general already perceived a bias in policing long before the recent trend of increased media coverage. The main difference that I can see is that now it’s a lot harder for white people, myself included, to be oblivious to it. That’s a good thing, because if the majority is ignorant of the problem they won’t be likely to do much to fix it.
If there’s a case of a white Philando Castile out there, pulled over and shot repeatedly when he reached for his wallet, as his girlfriend and her four-year-old child watched, then I certainly do hope the media covers it. And if he was pulled over because he had a narrow nose like a typical white guy, I hope they cover that, too. But they shouldn’t avoid mentioning such details, even if it’s the case that this sort of thing happens disproportionately often to Black people.
Maybe I shouldn’t muddy the waters with an imperfect analogy to another controversial topic, but this reminds me of global warming. No one can prove that this particular hurricane or that particular wildfire happened because of global warming. But we have good reason to think that with increasing temperatures, these events become more frequent.
Likewise, no one can prove that this particular police shooting of a Black man or that particular one is racially motivated, except in the occasional case where the police are recorded saying something like “looks like one of our suspects, just because of the wide-set nose.” But we have good reason to think that systemic racism results in more Black men getting killed.
If we demand certainty before we are willing to even mention the possibility that a major natural disaster was caused by global warming, or that a police shooting was caused by racism, then we’re going to end up with a lot more hurricanes and a lot more dead Black men.
The only way in which what you describe “fans the flames” is if the problem is black people incorrectly blaming cops. But that’s not the racism problem. The problem is that cases have been ignored for so long. The problem we have right now is a lack of accountability, and the solution is to make cops more accountable.
So, yeah, every time an unarmed black man is shot, it’s going to make the news. Then you need an actual good reason to explain it. Without that news, nothing will be explained, and the cops can go back to getting away with it again.
I mean, deaths by cop data wasn’t even collected. There’s no call for this. And cops keep complaining about having to have cameras. There’s not call for this.
If they are doing their job, they have no reason not to be transparent with what they do at all times. And they have no reason not to try and work with groups like BLM, as some great cops are in fact doing.
That’s the solution, not treating black people like idiots who can’t think for themselves and thus get corrupted by headlines.
No, the media is not sprinkling gas on any fire. The media is reporting an important and newsworthy story: The police do not treat black people and white people equally. And this is demonstrated, among other ways, in the comparative likelihood of being killed by the police.
This story is upsetting to some people. But people should be upset by this. And then they should look at the problem and try to fix it.
Once the problem has been fixed, the media can stop reporting it, and people can stop being upset.
Let’s go back to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The media covered plenty of marches, protests, sit-ins, strikes, boycotts, etc. Probably not all of them, but probably the majority of them.
The media coverage provoked both sides. Seeing the mobilizing negroes on TV made conservative whites dig in their heels deeper and motivated negroes and progressives to fight even more. The media had their cameras and microphones trained on angry blacks more than content and/or indifferent blacks–of which there likely more than a few. Perhaps if the media had given all the voices equal representation, the Civil Rights movement would have never taken off.
But was the media wrong for covering race-relations the way they did?