Print This Post By Stacey Patton
Megan Kanka. Amber Hagerman. JonBenét Ramsey. Elizabeth Smart. Caylee Anthony. Sandra Cantu.
When these six cute, middle-class white girls, ranging from age 2 to 14, went missing or were horrifically murdered, national news outlets devoted hours, days and weeks of coverage to their cases. But when children of color are victimized in similar ways, the mainstream media often remains conspicuously silent or provides scant coverage at best.
A quick GOOGLE news archive search illustrates my point.
There are 3,670 articles on the 1994 murder of 7-year-old Megan Kanka, who was raped and abducted by a twice-convicted sex offender who lived next door. The 1996 murder and abduction of 9-year-old Amber Hagerman produced 2,570 headlines. An astonishing 13,500 news stories helped sensationalize the 1996 murder of JonBenét Ramsey, a 6-year-old beauty pageant contestant found bound and strangled in her home.
Between June and November of 2002, 8,300 new stories were printed about the abduction and recovery of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart. Since last October, 1,570 stories have discussed the murder of 2-year-old Caylee Anthony, whose skeletal remains were found a month later. And in one month, 424 articles have appeared on 8-year-old Cantu, who was raped, killed, stuffed in a suitcase and thrown in a pond in northern California on April 11.
Do the math. Six young white girls. One abducted and later returned. Five killed. 30, 134 news stories and nearly two million total web hits. And with the exception of the Ramsey case, suspects have been captured, indicted, tried, and even sentenced to death for the brutal crimes against these innocent children.
Each of these girls has her own Wikipedia entry, which discusses their lives, details of their investigation, and archives media references and external links to various websites, talk shows, and made-for-TV documentaries and movies as well as child and victims advocacy sites.
Now enter the names of the following children: Corey Hatter, Ordero Hillard, Marcus Washington, Andre Malcolm, Arthur Tyler, Sameer Conn, Shaun Brown, Shaun Bowens, Kiyanna Salter, Daniel Calderon, Ernest Williams, Julian King, Brian Murdock, Quentin Buckner, Devour Robinson, Dushawn Johnson, Isiah Stroud, Andre Stephens, Esteban Martinez, Itzel Fernandez, Johnel Ford, Rachael Beauchamp, Johnny Edwards, Kendrick Pitts, Raheem Washington, Carnell Pitts, Franco Avila, Gregory Robinson, Lee Ivory Miller, Rakeem Washington, Tommie Williams, Marquell Blake, Juan Cazares, Christina Campos, and Alex Arellano.
All 36 of these schoolchildren, mostly black and a few Latinos, were killed in the streets of Chicago during the past nine months. They were shot, stabbed, beaten with bats, kicked to death, burned and run over by cars.
GOOGLE their names and you won’t get a return of hundreds of national news stories or thousands of web hits discussing their deaths. The only child of all these victims to gain a great deal of media attention was 7-year-old Julian King, the nephew of singer and actress Jennifer Hudson, killed last October by his mother’s estranged husband.
For the rest of the children, there are no Wikipedia entries. No documentaries. No made for TV films. And there won’t be. They’ll be remembered in a few grainy YouTube video tributes posted by friends and family members. And if there are more shootings, all of these children will be lumped together and described as statistics and tragic victims of urban warfare, even though most were not high school dropouts, gang members, or criminals. They were killed during day-to-day activities: walking to the store, playing in a park, waiting for a bus, or riding in a car with a parent.
Sure, CNN’s Anderson Cooper recently ran a story about the killings of these schoolchildren. But it took three dozen children to die before their murders became national news. Let a white woman or child go missing or be killed and what follows is predictable, sensational news coverage.
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert contends that a major part of the problem is that the country’s news media is still very color-conscious when covering murder. In an Op/Ed published this past Monday, Herbert wrote: “It’s a searing double-standard that tells us volumes about the ways in which we view one another, and whose lives are considered to have value in this society and whose are not.”
For years, Herbert has been one of the few voices consistently writing about the terrible toll on children in ghettos and barrios. What impact will the steady decline of the numbers of minority journalists in newsrooms have on this kind of coverage? This is one more reason why news decision makers and reporters must more accurately reflect the diversity of their audiences.
The disturbing silence about these 36 murders tells me that a great part of the white mainstream media has long been numb to black suffering, and it continues to be so. There’s nothing intrinsically new to this. What is new is that our 24-hour all-information-all-the-time culture has heightened the contradiction between the mainstream media’s obsession with white victimhood -a dynamic that probably stems from deeper impulses than just revulsion at specific crimes against young white females – and hearing statistics about lethal violence against black youth.
FBI statistics indicate that black children under age 19 comprise one-third of all homicides nationwide. The Bureau’s statistics reveal that in 2006, 1,375 black children were murdered, and 1,389 were murdered in 2007. The larger society’s avoidance of these statistics and the recent killings in Chicago is a deliberate act that tells me that black children’s lives have no intrinsic value in this country.
Why is it that when Laci Peterson, a pregnant white woman, was killed by her husband, our government passed federal legislation (The Laci and Conner Act) making it a double homicide to kill a pregnant woman? What kind of double standard is this, when the killings of pregnant women of color don’t grab headlines or inspire legislation? Are the lives of children of color living in urban inner cities less worthy of attention and protection than white fetuses?
Kanka’s murder inspired Megan’s Law, which requires the registry of convicted sex offenders, and Haberman’s killing provoked the establishment of the Amber Alert, designed to instantly galvanize communities to help search for missing children. But what of the killings of 36 black and Latino children in Chicago? Who will legislate on their behalf?
Father Michael Pfleger, a Roman Catholic priest at the St. Sabina Church on Chicago’s South Side, has ordered the American flag to be hung upside-down as a sign of distress and to symbolize the growing death toll among schoolchildren. His actions have drawn protests from some war veterans who believe it is a sign of disrespect for the sacrifices of soldiers who lost their lives protecting the country. A U.S. flag code, passed by Congress, states that the flag should be hung upside down only “as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.”
“There’s more attention being given to the flag than to children dying,” Pfleger told the Chicago Tribune. “What do we care about children dying? My God, isn’t it a dire emergency that we’re losing children — almost two classrooms in Chicago alone — to gun violence? This is a dire emergency. This is a pandemic.”
Pfleger is insistent that the murders of these children have not gotten the attention they need. He maintains that had 36 children died of swine flu, “there would be this great influx of resources that say, ‘Let’s stop this, let’s deal with this.’” Instead, the violence continues. “We’re hiding it. We’re ignoring it. We’re denying the problems.”
No child’s humanity should be devalued or overlooked because of their skin color or economic status. The murders of these 36 are a stark and glaring reminder of how our race-conscious media continues to assign unequal value to the lives of people of color.
We can continue to repeat our same old complaints about the mainstream media. But maybe the example of these child murders will provide the perfect opportunity to harness the power of the much more diverse and democratic blogosphere. In doing so, we can better represent and inform ourselves of the dire challenges facing our communities.
Stacey Patton is Senior Editor/Writer for TheDefendersOnline and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.
No comments:
Post a Comment