Many advocates for racial justice have been making the argument that there is bias in the media that helps perpetuate the notion that blacks are plainly bad, dangerous and criminal, and whites are fundamentally good.
An Iowa newspaper is illustrating this point very well.?The Gazette?in Cedar Rapids has decided to print on their pages, yearbook pictures showing seemingly upstanding white citizens. However, these white men have been charged with burglary. They also printed photos of black men who have been charged with burglary, yet they chose to show them in mugshots.
The white men, wrestlers at the University of Iowa, have been charged with at least seven burglaries in the area. One individual was also charged with drunken driving and another was charged with “interfering with official acts” from fighting with an officer (whatever that means).
The black men were charged with breaking into a residence and leaving with a television, about $240 in cash, and a cell phone; they were allegedly looking for a gun.
The Gazette’s?web site now shows the mugshots of the white men, but the original article was clearly printed in a way to show a difference in these suspects. According to the Raw Story news site, many comments from the original post from blogger Rafi D’Angelo who broke this story, show how people truly feel about matters of race. When disclosing the disparity in photos chosen, one person said:
“Good point other than it’s safe to say those blacks didn’t have school pics??
These are narratives that have been constructed carefully and successfully implanted into the minds of Americans; to feel negatively about blacks and positively about whites, even when the latter do bad things.
We live in a world where we have to demean Tamir Rice’s father to give some negativity to his life, which was unjustifiably cut short at 12 years by Cleveland Police. Yet we have seem mostly positive spin put on the life of Andreas Lubitz, the German pilot who ?intentionally crashed a plane in the French Alps killing himself and over 140 people recently. We have seen the media, in a way, “excuse” his actions by digging into his history of depression and psychosis. Yet, would this same treatment have been given if the pilot were black or Muslim? I don’t think so.
Anthony Hill, a man of color in DeKalb County Georgia, was mentally ill AND a veteran, yet where is the national, unbiased outcry against the police who shot him dead? He was unarmed. Why wasn’t his mental status able to put him in a positive light when he was the?victim?of physical violence, not the?perpetrator?of it. There are countless other examples of black victims getting worse media coverage than whites who kill.
This racial bias in how we cover crimes, victims, and people in general, has to stop. It creates a world that labels blacks, mostly men, in a way that causes preconceived notions, often resulting in their killing. America should be better than this but sadly, we are still very culpable when it comes to generating racial bias.
