INteresting one:Peculiar Double Standards
Scott McConnell The Conformist
nypress.com
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The news reached me over New Year's weekend. A horrible murder took
place in Wichita, KS, 10 days before Christmas. It had received
virtually no coverage beyond the local news.
The victims, three men and two women, white and in their 20s,were
gathered in a home in a middle-class neighborhood. Two were teachers;
two were engaged; one intended to become a priest. At 11 in the
evening, two black men, Reginald Carr, recently released from prison,
and his younger brother Jonathan, allegedly forced their way into the
house, abducted the five at gunpoint, drove them around in two cars,
forcing them to withdraw money from ATMs. Then they took the victims
to a soccer field and forced them to kneel in the snow. They
undressed the women, and raped one or perhaps both of them. Then they
shot all five execution-style in the head. Four died, but one woman
lived. Bleeding from her wound, she ran naked through the snow for a
mile, miraculously reaching a house where she got help. The suspects
were arrested the next day.
Wichita is shaken and mourning. A thousand people turned out for the
funeral of one victim, Jason Befort. Rev. James Dieker, celebrant at
the funeral Mass, told those gathered to look not for vengeance, but
to the wisdom of Jesus on the cross: "Forgive them, Father, for they
know not what to do."
Assuming that the criminal justice system will do its duty, those
words may be the right ones. Yet in the current national context,
with a divisive confirmation hearing looming for John Ashcroft and
leading Democrats littering the airwaves with incendiary charges
about the racist Republican heartland some questions about the
(non)reporting of the murder need airing as well.
If Michael McDermott's shooting of seven in their Wakefield, MA,
office on the day after Christmas deserves front-page treatment, or
if James Byrd being dragged to his death by three white attackers
should become a symbol of national shame, why don't Americans know
about Wichita?
They don't because the victims were white, the suspects black.
National news editors prefer a different script. Despite the raw
drama of the story - - the killers might still be at large were it
not for the heroic effort of a woman raped, shot and left for dead in
the snow - - it doesn't conform. What does fit are stories like the
Byrd murder: since he was hideously dragged to death by three white
men in 1998 The New York Times alone has made references to his
killing in 102 separate stories, most published before the NAACP
spent millions on a national campaign to boost black voter turnout by
linking George W. Bush to the crime.
Occasionally facts are invented to fit the script. Several years ago,
America's evening news viewers were inundated for months with stories
about an epidemic of burnings of black churches, carried out, it was
charged, by racist whites. A federal investigation eventually
concluded there was no racist conspiracy behind the church fires,
indeed no epidemic of arson at all: just a normal rate of fires, some
in white churches, some in black, some set in insurance scams, some
as pranks, some because the arsonist wanted to become a hero by
reporting a fire he had himself set.
But a few civil rights and "anti-hate watchdog" groups hyped stories
of the black-church arson epidemic, probably for their own
fundraising purposes, and the press lapped it up.
If asked, many editors would claim that one sort of crime (a racially
motivated killing like James Byrd's) deserves substantial coverage
because it is a "hate crime," while the murder of four Wichita young
people is not. The distinction is both false and pernicious. First,
though no bias crime investigation is under way in Wichita, there is
no reason whatever to think that a murder involving so much
gratuitous and symbolic humiliation of the victims (forcing one to
watch the rape of his fiancee in his last moments) is not motivated
by "hate" Indeed, what might a thorough hate crime investigation turn
up? Could the suspects have been stirred to anger against whites, for
instance, by Jesse Jackson's overheated charges that vicious racism
was at work in the Florida election?
The hate-crime rubric itself is a blueprint for corrosive double
standards. In law, it requires classifying crimes purportedly
motivated by certain kinds of "bias" as more grave and deserving of
serious punishment than others. The dual standard at once weakens a
force that could unite Americans of all races and cultures (horror at
crime) and threatens to transform the criminal justice system into an
arena for exacerbating the country's fault lines of race and
ethnicity.
I suspect some promoting the dual standard feel virtuous and
progressive - -that they are advancing the multiculturalist cause by
hyping news of crime of one sort and suppressing another. Some might
see whites, and particularly the sort of straight, normal heartland
Middle American types, as obstacles to desired social change and not
deserving of very much sympathy. Others simply adapt to prevailing
newsroom expectations, internalizing the double standards. Either way
it's a shameful spectacle, which does no honor to American journalism.
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