tabletmag | Of course there are real inequities in America, some of which are grounded in the legacies of racial discrimination. But visions to transform the country must reflect as complete and accurate a picture of social reality as can possibly be achieved. Steamrolling or suppressing inconvenient facts leaves us with a picture of reality that’s likely to be incomplete, erroneous, and consequently, harmful to progress.
Which brings us to the media’s selective and race-driven reporting on deadly police shootings. If the ultimate goal of such media coverage and the protests they generate is to effect police reform—greater transparency, accountability, etc.—the fetishization of Black victims of police shooting is hard to understand. Indeed, if this objective is paramount, then it would be best served by saturating the newswire whenever a person of any race is unjustly killed by law enforcement. Indeed, the more radical the goal of the movement, the more important it would appear to be that it attempt to appeal to the largest possible segment of the populace. That there is no dispositive evidence of racial bias in police use of deadly force would make this approach even more advisable. However, a recent analysis of mine shows that the opposite is happening.
Using data from The Washington Post Police Shootings database (2015-2020), I tallied and compared the number of search results for unarmed white versus Black police-shooting victims in a large data archive (ProQuest). In the end, and as depicted in the graph below, unarmed Black police-shooting victims generated nine times the number of news search results as white victims. What is more, roughly 32% of white victims generated zero search results as compared to just 12% of Black victims. None of these differences are explained by the elapsed time since the shooting nor any of the contextual, victim, or incident-related variables included in The Washington Post dataset (e.g., whether the victim fled from the responding officer, whether the victim attacked the responding officer, or whether the responding officer wore a body cam).
What the data presented here suggests is that editorial decisions made over the past decade at some of the most powerful media outlets in the world about what kind of language to use and what kind of stories merited coverage when it came to race—whatever the intention and level of forethought behind such decisions—has stoked a revival of racial consciousness among their readers. Intentionally or not, by introducing and then constantly repeating a set of key words and concepts, publications like The New York Times have helped normalize among their readership the belief that “color” is the defining attribute of other human beings. For those who adopt this singular focus on race, a racialized view of the world becomes baseline test of political loyalty. It requires adherents to overlook the immense diversity among so-called “People of Color” and “People Not-of-Color” (i.e., whoever is being lumped together as “white” according to the prevailing ideological fashion). In doing so, it has made stereotypes socially acceptable, if not laudable.
The same media institutions that have promoted revanchist identitarianism and the radical transformation of American society along racial lines, could instead have focused their attention and influence on improving the quality of life for all. Working to ensure that Americans of any background aren’t unjustly victimized by the police and have access to quality health care, schools, and affordable housing doesn’t require the promotion of a “race-consciousness” that divides society into “oppressed” and “privileged” color categories. To the contrary, it requires that we de-emphasize these categories and unite in pursuit of common interests. This may not suit the media’s prerogatives, and it may not appeal to activists whose desire for cultural “recognition” trumps their devotion to material progress, but it does offer the potential benefit of improving the lives of ordinary Americans.
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