– Faria Athar
On the 20th of April, 1999, over 30 people were either killed or injured in a shooting in Colorado. Most of the victims were teenagers aged 15 to 18. They were just attending their regular school. The fatalities would have been almost ten-fold if not for the failed bombs. The two perpetrators had bombs fitted in the school cafeteria, a fire bomb and over 99 explosive devices. They hoped to set off the bombs in the cafeteria at the busiest times of the day1 thus killing the maximum number of people, had the bombs exploded around 455 people would’ve died.
During the investigation after the shooting, the media tried to rationalize the shooting citing various causes that ranged from bullying to music, video games, family background and so forth. Researchers noted that the perpetrators suffered from depression and perhaps loneliness. But among their miseries the perpetrators had one privilege that helped dismiss them as loners, ignited larger debates on gun control and most importantly gained them forgiveness. They were both white American males.
Flash forward to 2015 and such attacks still persist. Dylann Roof (a young white man) opened fire in a black church killing nine people. Following his attack white supremacists in the country decided to burn down four other black churches. It was a heinous example of racism and hateful chauvinism. The media however chose to report it very hesitantly as a crime. It was reported in passive mode and the sheer atrocity of the incident was heavily downplayed.
Compare these to an ISIL mediated attack on Christian Churches. The reporting is aggressive and continuous. It almost inevitably gets the front page with titles such as “Islamic terrorists turn Churches into torture chambers”. The tone they use is active and intentionally horrifying making it seem almost as if the reader could be the next victim even though the attack would’ve happened miles away.
While a white man’s crime is caused by depression, a Muslim’s is caused by his religion, an African-American’s because of his color and an immigrant’s because of his nationality. The media lazily categorizes crimes by such minorities into labels such that a crime by a member of any of the group always falls into that label irrespective of the context. It also helps them to reach convenient conclusions regarding the killers’ motives. Sometimes when ties to the label they’ve created and the killer’s personality seem weak they attempt to reinforce them by images, history etc.
For example, when the world was protesting the death of unarmed black men in America, the media would bring up random instances from the past where the victims ‘appeared’ to be violent. They weren’t related to the victim’s death and often happened way back in the past, but still bolstered their image as ‘bad’. Similarly, in 2014 when a Malaysian aircraft crashed, a popular South Indian news paper published a picture of the Malaysian Muslim pilot grinning holding a butchering knife. Underlying connotation? He probably liked killing.
Faria is doing her 1st year BSc in
St. Francis College, Hyderabad