The contrast in media narratives about Baltimore and Waco are undeniable—but many white Americans are blind to them.
By
Chauncey DeVega
Earlier this week, outlaw motorcycle clubs engaged in a daylight gun
battle in Waco, Texas. This combat involved hundreds of people. The mall
where the riot occurred was left resembling a war zone, with hundreds
of spent bullet cartridges strewn about, broken bodies everywhere, and
police and other local municipal services overwhelmed. By the end of
melee, nine outlaws were dead, 18 wounded, and at least 165 people were
arrested; 120 guns were recovered at the crime scene.
In late
April and early May, African-American young people protested the killing
of Freddie Gray by the Baltimore police. Those peaceful protests
escalated into a local uprising against the police. This was neither
random nor unprovoked: The Baltimore uprising was a response to
the long-simmering upset and righteous anger about
poverty, racism, civil rights violations, and abuse by the police. No
one was killed during the Baltimore protests or subsequent uprising.
The
gun battle chaos in Waco was a result of rivalries between outlaw
motorcycle clubs, in competition with one another for the profits from
drug and gun traffic, various protection rackets, and other criminal
enterprises. The Baltimore uprising was a reaction to social, economic,
racial, and political injustice; a desperate plea for justice in an era
of police brutality and white-on-black murder by the state.
The
participants in the Waco, Texas gun battle were almost exclusively
white. The participants in the Baltimore Uprising were almost all black.
Quite predictably, the corporate news media’s narrative frame for those
events was heavily influenced by race. News coverage of these two
events has stretched the bounds of credulity by engaging in all manner
of mental gymnastics in order to describe the killings, mayhem, and gun
battle in Waco as anything other than a “riot.”
As writers such as Salon’s own Jenny Kutner
keenly observed:
I
use the terms “shootout” and “gunfire erupted” after reading numerous
eyewitness reports, local news coverage and national stories about the
“incident,” which has been described with a whole host of phrases
already. None, however, are quite as familiar as another term that’s
been used to describe similarly chaotic events in the news of late:
“Riot.”
Of course, the deadly shootout in Texas was exactly that: A
shootout. The rival gangs were not engaged in a demonstration or
protest and they were predominantly white, which means that — despite
the fact that dozens of people engaged in acts of obscene violence —
they did not “riot,” as far as much of the media is concerned. “Riots”
are reserved for communities of color in protest, whether they organize
violently or not, and the “thuggishness” of those involved is debatable.
That doesn’t seem to be the case in Texas.
The
dominant corporate news media have used the Baltimore uprising and other
similar events to attack Black America’s character, values, and
culture. The argument is clear: The events in Waco were committed by
white men who happen to be criminals; the Baltimore uprising was
committed by black people who, because of their “race” and “culture,”
are inherently criminal.
Racial bias in news reporting has been
repeatedly documented by scholars in media studies, critical race
theory, political science, and sociology. As anti-racism activist Jane
Elliot incisively observed, “People of color can’t even turn on the
televisions in their own homes without being exposed to white racism.”
The centuries of racism, and resulting stereotypes about the inherent
criminality of Black Americans, are central to why the events in Waco
and Baltimore have received such divergent news coverage.
In
an interview about the Waco shootout, Harrold Pollock, co-director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, makes this point very clear:
I
have never encountered a gang incident in Chicago remotely like this.
The number of perpetrators involved — not to mention the nine deaths —
far exceed the typical urban gang-related shooting. Maybe there was some
gang incident in Chicago like this decades ago. But this sort of
pitched battle? I’ve never heard of anything like it. If these biker
gang members were non-white, I think this would cause a national freak
out…
But I do think that our views about urban crime are so framed
by race and inequality in a variety of ways. When criminal activity
seems unrelated to these factors, it doesn’t hit our national dopamine
receptors in quite the same way. People tend to view these motorcycle
gangs as a kind of curiosity.
Yet, there is a deep
resistance by many in White America to accepting the basic fact that the
mainstream American news media is habitually racist in its depiction of
non-whites.
The mass media helps to create what Walter Lippman
famously referred to as “the pictures inside our heads.’” The news media
(and popular culture as a whole) helps individuals to create
a cognitive map of the world around them by teaching lessons about life,
politics, society, desire, relationships, and other values. This
cognitive map also helps individuals to locate themselves relative to
other groups of people in a given community. This cognitive map provides
a set of rules, guidelines, and heuristics for navigating social
reality.
In a society such as the United States, organized around
maintaining certain hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality,
how one sees themselves is often a reflection of precisely how they
are not members of a given group. Those lessons are internalized on both
a conscious and subconscious level; on a basic level, the in-group is
defined relative to the out-group.
This is the essence of making a person or group into the Other.
Simone de Beauvoir, feminist philosopher, made this essential observation:
The
category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the
most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the
expression of a duality — that of the Self and the Other. This duality
was not originally attached to the division of the sexes; it was not
dependent upon any empirical facts. It is revealed in such works as that
of Granet on Chinese thought and those of Dumézil on the East Indies
and Rome. The feminine element was at first no more involved in such
pairs as Varuna-Mitra,
Uranus-Zeus, Sun-Moon, and Day-Night than it was
in the contrasts between Good and Evil, lucky and unlucky auspices,
right and left, God and Lucifer. Otherness is a fundamental category of
human thought.
Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the
One without at once setting up the Other over against itself. If three travelers chance to occupy the same compartment, that is enough to make
vaguely hostile ‘others’ out of all the rest of the passengers on the
train.
In small-town eyes all persons not belonging to the village are
‘strangers’ and suspect; to the native of a country all who inhabit
other countries are ‘foreigners’; Jews are ‘different’ for the
anti-Semite, Negroes are ‘inferior’ for American racists, aborigines are
‘natives’ for colonists, proletarians are the ‘lower class’ for the
privileged.
In a society like the United States, one
that is structured around maintaining white (and male) privilege, a type
of logic is created where some groups and individuals are deemed to be
more valuable and privileged than others.
Language, as a way to
describe the world around us, is pivotal in this process; it locates a
given person relative to others, describes relationships, and both
acknowledges and reinforces differences in power. Language also evolves.
It is not fixed. And it reveals a great deal about changing norms about
identity. As such, language is inherently political.
In America’s
public discourse, the knee-jerk and instinctive move to refer to black
people as “thugs”, and the parallel impulse to resist any such marking
of white individuals with the same language, is a function of how the
“I” and the “ego” are structured in a race-stratified society. Thus, the
divergence in language used by the corporate new media to frame and
discuss the events in Waco may actually reveal much more about how white
Americans see themselves than it does about people of color, and black
youth in particular.
White racial logic demands
that whites and blacks engaged in the same behavior are often described
using different language. (White people have a “fracas,” while black
people “riot”; during Hurricane Katrina white people were “finding
food,” while black people were “looting.”)
In the post civil
rights era, White racial logic also tries to immunize and protect
individual white folks from critical self-reflection about their egos
and personal relationships to systems of unjust and unearned advantage
by deploying a few familiar rhetorical strategies, such as “Not all
white people,” “We need to talk about class not race,” or similarly
hollow and intellectual vapid and banal claims about “reverse racism.”
Ego, language, and cognition intersect in the belief that Whiteness is
inherently benign and innocent.
Whiteness is many things. It is a
type of property, privilege, “invisibility,” and “normality.”
Whiteness
also pays a type of psychological wage to its owners and beneficiaries.
While its relative material value may be declining in an age of
neo-liberalism and globalization, the psychological wage wherein
Whiteness is imagined as good and innocent, and those who identify
themselves as “white” believe themselves to be inherently just and
decent, still remains in force. One of the most important psychological
wages of Whiteness remains how white folks can imagine themselves as the
preeminent individual, the universal “I” and “We,” while benefiting
from the unearned advantages that come with white privilege as a type of
group advantage.
Non-whites in the United States, and the West
more broadly, do not have the luxury of being individuals. If a “Black”
person commits a crime, it is somehow a reflection of the criminality of
Black people en masse. Similarly, when a person who happens to be
marked as “Arab” or “Muslim” commits an act of political violence, an
obligatory conversation on the relationship between “terrorism” and the
“Muslim community” ensues.
However, white folks can commit all
manner of murder and mayhem, and there is no national conversation about
the meanings of “Whiteness” or of “White America’s” particular
problems. In many ways, being white is the ultimate marker of radical
autonomy and freedom: Its members rarely feel the obligation — nor are
they made to by the media or the state — to be held accountable for each
other’s behavior.
So it is that white people who do “bad” things
are “bad” individuals; while black and brown people who do “bad” things
are representative of a type of collective or group problem and
pathology.
During those rare public moments of intervention, when
the particular problems and pathologies of White America are discussed
white denial is immediately deployed as a type of defense shield (the
response to any rigorous or critical discussion(s) of Whiteness and
white privilege is especially toxic and hostile from white
conservatives). Ultimately, white denial is the immune system of a white
body politic that is averse to critical self-reflection about its own
poor behavior and shortcomings.
There are many examples of this phenomenon:
- White
male college students: Most recently, a Boston University Professor
named Saida Grundy dared to state that white male college students are a
problem population. Based on studies of white male college students’
use of drugs and alcohol, propensity to violence, sexual assault, and
other negative conduct, Dr. Grundy’s claim is rather obvious and matter
of fact. Nevertheless, she was met by howls of rage and upset by
aggrieved Whiteness. Saida Grundy has been forced to apologize. Her
future employment at Boston University may be imperiled.
- Mass shooters: America is sick with gun violence. Mass shootings are a particular problem and behavior of white men, as they constitute approximately 30 percent of the population andcommit about 70 percent of mass shootings.
However, concerns about public health and white men’s relationship to
mass shootings have been met by rancor. The suggestion that “aggrieved
white male entitlement syndrome” may be fueling white male gun violence
is routinely shouted down as impolitic.
- Domestic terrorists: The
United States has a serious problem with right-wing domestic terrorism.
Right-wing domestic terrorists, almost all of them white men, have
killed police officers, planted bombs, engaged in sedition and treason,
and have openly talked of starting a second American Civil War by
attacking the federal government. America’s police and other civil
authorities are so concerned about these developments that they have issued a number of reports and alerts on the matter. Republicans and the right-wing media were so aghast at these facts that they chose to censor and harass the officials who dared to suggest that America may have a serious problem with
white domestic terrorists. Public safety is secondary to protecting
white men—and the White Right—from being held accountable for domestic
terrorism.
- Financial gangsters: The American (and world) economy
was almost destroyed by the recklessness of casino capitalism,
financial gangsterism, fraud, and other criminal acts by Wall Street.
The people who participated in those acts ruined lives, and through the
loss of jobs, stress, and wrecked communities, have shortened the life
spans of many millions of people. Those who created said chaos were
mostly white and male. If these financial thugs were instead people of
color or women, the Great Recession would have been met with rage and
upset about “affirmative action,” “unqualified” professionals, or about
the “poor cultural influences” of the people who broke the world.
Instead, there was no conversation about the white male culture of greed
and destruction among the financiers and plutocrats, they have not been
imprisoned for their crimes, nor have those white male banksters and
casino capitalists been marked as a criminal class.
Against
all of these examples of malfeasance, black people must be deemed thugs
who uniquely “riot” and constitute a natural “criminal class” for the
many lies of Whiteness to solidly cohere. The cognitive mapping,
language, and sense of ego that support a belief in the inherent
goodness and nobility of Whiteness cannot withstand rigorous and
critical self-examination.
The contradictions in how Black
Americans and other people of color are discussed by the mainstream
media, as compared to white folks, are glaring and obvious for those who
choose to see them. Those who choose to speak truth to power about
white supremacy, white privilege, and white racism are forcing White
America to confront what the latter has by choice deemed as somehow
illegible and unseen. To force White America to realize that, yes, it
too has a criminal class of people, is pathological, and neither
inherently noble nor benign, is a type of ideologically disruptive
moment that has and will continue to be met with rage, anger, denial,
and dismissal.
Why? Because such observations and facts are too
challenging for many white individuals to process, because they have
been socialized by a society that deems them better than the Other by
virtue of belonging to a semi-exclusive club of people who are
categorized as being members of the “white race.”
But white denial does not make the aforementioned facts any less true.
When
white folks, whether among the pundit classes, or in day-to-day
interactions, are confronted with the gross contradictions of their
language — why black people in Baltimore are called “thugs,” while white
outlaw bikers who kill people somehow did not engage in a “riot” — they
may appear confused, frustrated, or perhaps even willfully stupid as
they try to evade and explain the distinction between the two examples.
I
have come to the conclusion that many white folks are legitimately
confused when confronted by such examples, that their inability to
process this data is sincere; those who have not disowned their
Whiteness and white privilege are unable on a cognitive level to process
many aspects of empirical reality. Units of speech such as “white
crime,” “white pathology,” and “white thugs” have no meaning in the
cognitive schema and conceptual grid of Whiteness.
Such concepts “do not compute.”
As
great American thinkers such as Martin Luther King Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois,
and others have suggested, Whiteness and white privilege have damaged
the cognitive, intellectual, ethical and moral processes of White
America (as distinct from any given white person). The challenge thus
becomes: Is it possible to help those white individuals who are still
loyal to Whiteness and White racial logic, to see the world as it
actually is, and to transcend the White Gaze?
One of the existential questions that have repeatedly confronted Black America is: “what does it feel like to be a problem?”
White America needs to begin to ask itself the same question.
Chauncey DeVega’s essays on race, politics, and popular culture can also be read at his home site Chaunceydevega.com
He is also a regular guest on Ring of Fire Radio and TV, and hosts the weekly podcast known as The Chauncey DeVega Show.
