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.