The past week has offered a case study in how race shapes empathy and blame.
Take Mark Anthony Conditt, the 23-year-old who terrorized Austin, Texas, with a series of bombings. After listening to his confession tape, local police have ruled out hate as a motive in a set of attacks that took two lives and injured several others. Conditt’s message, police chief Brian Manley explained, was “the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his personal life.” Conditt wasn’t a terrorist—the term we usually affix to people who organize bombings—he was simply lashing out...
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Now compare this to the now-infamous New York Times story on Michael Brown, described as “no angel” for his occasional delinquency and dabbling in drugs and alcohol. Brown was killed in a confrontation with police. He was unarmed.
To be white, male, and suspected of a serious crime is, in the eyes of police and much of the media, to still be a full individual entitled to respect and dignity. Your actions are treated as an isolated incident, not indicative of a larger pathology shared by others who occupy your social position or hold your religious beliefs. To be black (or to be Muslim or undocumented) is to lose that nuance, even if you’re the victim. After Trayvon Martin’s shooting death at the hands of George Zimmerman in 2012, NBC News ran a story announcing one fact: that Martin had been suspended three times from school...
A 2017 study commissioned by the advocacy organization Color of Change found that news media consistently portrayed black families and individuals as criminal, with that criminality flowing from the “internal disposition of Black people” versus an “external problem with historic roots.” This is racism, but it’s not the crude hatred of the white supremacist. It’s rather a “broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others,” as the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has put it. The only way to understand that skepticism is to grasp the ways racism has shaped definitions of personhood and citizenship over the course of 400 years...
