Media Race Bias, Kids With Guns

I’ve been reading about the Columbine shootings lately for a theatre project I’m considering, but I’ve noticed an unspoken distinction made on racial lines between school shootings and teen violence. For the most part, the large-scale shootings that make the news and are analyzed for decades a perpetrated by and against primarily white students (the exception being Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech perpetrator), while teen or ‘youth’ violence is the term used to describe shootings or homicides perpetrated by and against nonwhite students.

This is not a new trend. In 1970, the National Guard opened fire against college students at Kent State University; four students were killed and nine were injured. Ten days later, a similar event occurred at Jackson State University; two students were killed and twelve were injured. These events were processed by American media very differently; the Kent State students were depicted as helpless victims, just young people exercising their right to protest the Vietnam War. The students at Jackson State were described as violent, and it was reported that they had started fires and were throwing rocks (though students at Kent State had been burning their draft cards, and some students in town has been throwing beer bottles- which prompted authorities to call in the National Guard). The difference reflected public opinion: Kent State students were victims, but Jackson State students were ‘asking for it’ by being belligerent.

Kent State was (and is) comprised primarily white students, while Kent State was primarily black. By victimizing white students and demonizing black students, American media was reiterating the primitive black stereotype that exists to disenfranchise black people, to constantly cast them as villains, or as morons in need of discipline.

According to this 1996 report, “black males ages 14-24 now constitute 17 percent of the victims of homicide and over 30 percent of the perpetrators. Their white counterparts remained about ten percent of the victims, and about 18 percent of the perpetrators, yet declined in proportionate size of the population”. Published three years before the Columbine massacre, the report indicates that young black men represent a larger percentage of perpetrators of homicide, and inferred from projected demographics that teen violence on the whole would continue to increase in the coming years.

The way we digest information about teen violence represents so much of what is wrong with the media. We only hear about the big, anomalous events (Columbine, the Casey Anthony trial), and while these events are exciting and interesting because they are rare, when this is the majority of the representation teen violence receives, it becomes a representation of all teen violence, instead of the norm. We don’t hear about the black victims and perpetrators in any the same context; this is automatically dubbed as gang violence, which is viewed as a more ‘adult’ crime and thus infers more guilt for those involved). Perhaps there are fewer instances of school violence for nonwhite students (many students in nonwhite or low-income districts can’t enter the premises without going through a metal detector)- but that does not mean that they don’t experience violence, or that they are not victims in the same way the students shot at Columbine were.

Reclamation: Pros and Cons

For more info on Slutwalk, look here: http://www.slutwalktoronto.com/

For the most part, this is in reaction to the Slutwalk campaign that began in Toronto, but I’ve been considering the topic of verbal reclamation for a while now. It’s something that’s discussed often in the context of African-American studies, because the process of reclaiming the word ‘nigger’ has already reached the point where the word has been completely separated from its negative history in some social circles (I encountered this most often when I was in grade school- students would use the word in lieu of ‘person’, usually, but not always, with a friendly connotation, and with little or no connection to the word’s racial heritage).

Part of Slutwalk is the reclamation of dehumanizing labels directed at women that enforce the idea that a woman is responsible for her own sexual assault. I certainly support their cause: No one, male or female, should ever feel as if they somehow asked to be violated. But is it possible to reclaim a word? To change the meaning of a word by force?

Language constantly evolves. There have been efforts to curb this evolution (the Academie Francaise is one example of an institution that has attempted to stagnate language), but necessity and society have dictated otherwise. With new technology comes the necessity for new words to describe it. Logically then, wouldn’t social change regarding how we treat women require new words to describe them as well?

Obviously this analogy is imperfect. When a new piece of technology is developed, it often outmodes previous models, and those models are forgotten and replaced. The same is not true of social change- cannot be true of social change. It is important to remember where we have come from in regards to civil rights and social equality. And deleting words like ‘slut’ from our lexicon will not erase its existence- nor will it erase the injustice that accompanied it.

Yet, does using the word as if it were not derogatory make it so? What about the use of the word ‘fag’ or the phrase ‘that’s so gay’? This is not an act of reclamation (usually), here the words are being used as a substitute for stupid or undesirable. Yet often these words are not intended as homophobic slurs, even though they are being said by people who are not homosexual. While the use of these phrases remains derogatory, it is not necessarily intended to be an attack on homosexual people. Does that mean that it isn’t? Does that mean that the implication at gay is equivalent to stupid is irrelevant?

Regarding the word ‘nigger’, it is also implied that it is acceptable to reclaim the word, as long as the person doing so is black. However, the act of reclamation seeks to revoke the power that the word receives from its inherent racism. But in relegating its use based on race, it seems that the obverse becomes true: to use the word nonchalantly is a privilege denied to those not of a certain race.

Finally, is reclamation a moral act? Yes, by revoking power from words like ‘slut’, one might seek to permeate and change the culture that created the word in the first place. But is it appropriate for these words to exist in our language, powerless and non-theatening? When one reads a book like Our Nig, the affect of the language should be viscerally painful, it should reflect the misery of the character caused by the period. Would the affect be the same if the word ‘nigger’ had been forgotten as anything but harmless slang?

I ask many questions because I honestly don’t know the answers; I don’t know enough about language to even begin to figure them out. I personally do not use the words described above; I do not wish to be associated with their connotations. But I was also incensed when I found out that new editions of Huckleberry Finn would use the word ‘slave’ in place of every use of the word ‘nigger’. While I appreciate the idea of dismantling the meaning of words, I feel that it’s not something that can be done by choice (I still cringe when I hear or read some of these words, even in a neutral environment). Yet I’m still comfortable using them (in quotation) when they are being discussed. Language is complicated, I suppose.

Plessy and Ferguson and Reparations

I wanted to reblog something neat I saw on thedailywh.at:

Apparently the descendants of the Plessy v. Ferguson case (which found that separate but equal institutions could be upheld by the constitution and was later overturned via Brown v. Board of Education) got together and founded a group intended to increase understanding of Civil Rights. (Website: http://plessyandferguson.org/history.html).

The symbolism of this is really striking me. I’ve always felt that, while history, and especially our personal history is crucial to our understanding of self, I don’t think that anyone should ever feel confined by it.

I know someone whose ancestors owned slaves. And this has always made this person uncomfortable, which has made it difficult to discuss this period in American history. And while I understand this discomfort, its origin is something that often disappoints me when I enter a discussion about race. A descendant of a slave master, in this period, should not be afraid of being judged for this ancestry. None of us choose our ancestry, just as none of us are able to choose what color we happen to be. And while the identity we form is certainly effected by these factors, they are not so essential that it is fair to judge us based on them.

I have similar thoughts about reparations day (website: http://reparationsday.com/). While I can appreciate the idea behind the initiative (the way black and nonwhite people have been treated in America has disadvantaged them, and it is very difficult to compensate for these disadvantages), I think that the idea is offensive and counter-intuitive. The website explains that, on this day, black people will panhandle, asking for money from white people to acknowledge and compensate for slavery. I am white, and my ancestors arrived in America three generations ago, well after the Civil War had ended. And, because they were Irish, they were treated like less than people. While I do not feel that this experience is in any way comparable to the experience of slavery that so many generations of people suffered through, I do not feel that this experience was in any way my fault, and I find the idea of apologizing to every black person for slavery to be repulsive (as is assuming that every black American is descended from slaves). And I don’t think that handing slave descendants a couple of dollars is going to resolve the issue. From what I understand, reparations day began as an art piece, but it seems like some individuals want to spread the idea too thin by turning it into a movement, and in this way it has become something it should not. It has become about blaming current individuals for the crime of heritage, and it turns the necessary act of acknowledging history into and act of judgement.

The symbolism of the picture above illustrates this idea to me; the idea that we can learn from our heritage, and also become better through our understanding of it.