{"id":265,"date":"2013-05-14T06:41:01","date_gmt":"2013-05-14T13:41:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/?p=265"},"modified":"2013-05-14T06:41:01","modified_gmt":"2013-05-14T13:41:01","slug":"bloody-sunday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/2013\/05\/bloody-sunday.html","title":{"rendered":"Bloody Sunday"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"silence\"<\/a>I was all set to write about something else, which I may write about later, but then something happened.\u00a0 I saw the news on Sunday that 19 people were shot at a Mother\u2019s Day parade in New Orleans, and that made me extremely sad to hear, but that\u2019s not actually the something that happened that made me not write about the something else.\u00a0 Because I felt like plenty of people were going to write about that, right?, a shooting in broad daylight at a large group of people\u2014one that injured 19 people, including children, at a parade, three gunmen and the sun shining down.\u00a0 That story would get told, I thought, and so I continued to think about this other thing, a topic entirely unrelated to diversity and demographics, sitting with my family and celebrating Mother\u2019s Day, periodically checking the news.<\/p>\n

On Monday morning, I woke up and pulled up my news aggregator on my phone and noticed that there was no mention of the 19 people shot in New Orleans.\u00a0 I went to the front page of the New York Times<\/em>\u00a0and couldn\u2019t find a single mention of the shooting of 19 people in New Orleans.\u00a0 I did a search and learned that they ran an AP-written story on the shooting of 19 people in New Orleans in Monday\u2019s print edition on page A11, 200 words.\u00a0 So far, except for an editorial by Frank Bruni, that seems to be the only article they\u2019ve run.<\/p>\n

The FBI spokesperson was very clear that this was \u201cjust\u201d street violence.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom all of our intelligence,\u201d she said, \u201c we have no reason to believe it was an act of terror, just street violence.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Sunday, CNN and the New York Times<\/em> had it running on their front pages for a while.\u00a0 So did the Washington Post<\/em>.\u00a0 Monday, from some informal polling of friends, that coverage was mostly gone\u2014in the case of the New York Times<\/em>, the shooting was entirely absent from the front page of their website by midday Monday, and it has remained absent since.<\/p>\n

In that same informal polling of Facebook friends (and friends of friends), 51 people told me how they had learned about the shootings in New Orleans.\u00a0 Over a third of the people said they didn\u2019t know it had happened, and had found out from me.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had no idea, and I watched the news last night.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI always check CNN and this is the first I heard of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is so weird and silent that I assumed I was missing something\u2026\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don\u2019t really know how to write about what I\u2019m feeling here.\u00a0 It is a mixture of outrage and profound sadness.<\/p>\n

Another incident happened a while ago.\u00a0 It was a public event, lots of people around, violence that interrupted joy.\u00a0 It was terrifying.\u00a0 It was labeled terror.\u00a0 Twelve people died, 100 or more were injured.\u00a0 A full-scale manhunt ensured in which a city was locked down, people forced to stay indoors.\u00a0 A guy wrote a story about how he got stuck with a one-night-stand all day because of the lockdown<\/a>.\u00a0 James Taylor and Aerosmith participated in a fundraiser<\/a> with New Kids on the Block.\u00a0 Barack Obama went on television and, having learned what happens when you take too long to call something an act of terror, called it an act of terror<\/a>.\u00a0 At least one state senator called for the torture of the suspects<\/a> (Quote: \u201cSo, scum bag #2 in custody. Who wouldn\u2019t use torture on this punk to save more lives?\u201d).\u00a0 A whole lot of people got Chechnya and the Czech Republic mixed up.\u00a0 The New York Post<\/em> and Reddit, among others, were suddenly filled with vigilantes who started digitally hunting down a high schooler<\/a> and a missing college kid who ended up dead<\/a>.\u00a0 The New York Times<\/i> has over 151,000 results if you search for \u201cBoston marathon bombing.\u201d\u00a0 And it deserved all the coverage it got and more.<\/p>\n

But what it got me thinking about was why<\/i> one incident, a massive violent attack, would get tremendous and sustained media attention while another similar attack would not.\u00a0 In a country where 78% of Americans go online<\/a> and 46% of Americans have smartphones<\/a>, within 24 hours of the bombing I swear I read, though cannot now find, an article that indicated that about 75% of the entire adult US population knew it had happened.\u00a0 And now, here, a third of my highly-connected, social-media and traditional-media-savvy friends didn’t know that 19 people got shot in broad daylight.<\/p>\n

So what are the similarities and differences here?\u00a0 Both were mass attacks, though the Boston one (1) took place on a weekday, (2) was a bombing instead of a shooting, (3) had fatalities, (4) occurred at a famous event, (5) took place in a major northern city, (6) injured\/killed predominantly white people, (7) was perpetuated by two foreign-born brothers who were Muslim.\u00a0 The New Orleans attack occurred on a weekend, no one was killed (though two children were among the injured), and was perpetuated by three black men against a bunch of black people in a southern city.<\/p>\n

The New Orleans story wasn\u2019t sexy.\u00a0 No one died.\u00a0 There weren\u2019t photographers there to capture heartbreaking images of men with their legs blown off being saved by good Samaritans.\u00a0 For a while, there wasn\u2019t even video, though they\u2019ve found some now.\u00a0 But also, and crucially, it wasn\u2019t \u201cterrorism.\u201d\u00a0 It was \u201cstreet violence.\u201d\u00a0 Which means it happened down there, to those people, the way it has been happening for so long.\u00a0 Nevermind that 19 people getting shot at should always be classified as a type of terrorism. \u00a0And so the story, after less than 24 hours, was subsumed by discussions of the IRS going after Tea Party groups and various Republicans trying to come up with enough about Benghazi to pin it on Obama.\u00a0 Joyce Brothers died.\u00a0 Angelina Jolie got a preventative double mastectomy.<\/p>\n

The media, increasingly, follows what people latch on to.\u00a0 It attempts to secure its survival by measuring readership and impact and choosing this story over that story based on what people are most likely to read.\u00a0 The New York Times<\/em>, precariously balanced on the precipice of insolvency, moves on to something else that its loyal readers will read, that will draw the attention of those inside that demographic that is most precious to the advertisers that keep the company going now.\u00a0 Some of this may sound familiar to us in the arts.\u00a0 It should; this is sometimes (often?) how things seem to work now.<\/p>\n

We must constantly fight against the impulse to only tell the stories that our current fans want us to tell.<\/p>\n

My na\u00efve frustration at the disparity in coverage between these two incidents leaves some of my friends and colleagues of color frustrated in turn that I can be so surprised that such disparity might still exist.<\/p>\n

\u201cClayton,\u201d one says, \u201cblack people got shot by a black person and nobody died.\u00a0 Why would you expect that to be news? Why do white people always think that black folk are joking when we say that THEY DON\u2019T CARE ABOUT US!!\u00a0 Are you starting to believe me?!\u201d<\/p>\n

That breaks my heart.\u00a0 And it makes it hard for me to discuss the need for us to create a safe space in which we can be clumsy, in which we can navigate stumbling towards a better understanding of the world, because as another black colleague put it during a panel session I moderated (paraphrased from memory), \u201cI am so angry that we are still having this conversation.\u00a0 You keep saying we need to offer up a safe space for this conversation.\u00a0 It is hard to feel unsafe, isn\u2019t it? I know I am tired of feeling unsafe as a woman.\u00a0 I am tired of feeling unsafe as a black woman. And now you white people want to feel safe to talk about it?\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet, yes, I am frustrated, and perhaps that frustration emerges from a na\u00efve and narrow understanding of the realities of the world.\u00a0 And yes, it must be exhausting to have been shouting at the top of your lungs that inequality exists everywhere for decades and to now, now, have to graciously nod as a few white people emerge groping and begin, just begin, to understand.\u00a0 It must be strange to feel ragged and tired of feeling unsafe much of the time, and then to be asked by those who sometimes make you feel unsafe for safety, time to process, the patience to make mistakes.<\/p>\n

I am ashamed to have to ask, but I will anyway: my anger is genuine, as is my hope that we can start, haltingly, to make it better.\u00a0 I don\u2019t deserve your patience, and you don\u2019t deserve to have to wait to see a day when 19 people being shot would last 24 hours of a news cycle regardless of circumstance.\u00a0 I know my belief that change is possible grates against your hard-set and long-learned belief that we can\u2019t really change.<\/p>\n

There are places in the world where New Orleans made instant and front-page news.\u00a0 Friends in New Zealand and the Netherlands let me know that they knew instantly, that it was blared on the radio, that it was covered and covered and covered.\u00a0 In some places, \u201cstreet violence\u201d is still shocking enough to warrant air.\u00a0 In some places, the nuance of north and south, of black and white, of dead and wounded, of bombs and guns, is still lost amidst the general grief that such bad things can happen to people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was all set to write about something else, which I may write about later, but then something happened.\u00a0 I saw the news on Sunday that 19 people were shot at a Mother\u2019s Day parade in New Orleans, and that made me extremely sad to hear, but that\u2019s not actually the something that happened that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-265","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}