Within the past two years, mainstream media has exhausted their resources to bring you breaking news coverage of every unjustified police shooting that has occurred. Every single story that broke the national news cycle was the slaying of an African American. Not one Hispanic or white person ever broke through CNN’s exclusive line of coverage. Yet there is another side to the story they don’t tell you.
In 2015, 172 Hispanics, 258 American Africans and 494 whites were killed by the police. So far in 2016, 75 Hispanics, 123 African Americans and 238 whites have been killed. There is no denying that, in some cases, race plays into the slaying of African Americans. These racist instances are the stories that get the media’s attention. Murder of African Americans by the police under questionable circumstances unleashes the ugly reality that race relations are far from perfect and racism is still very much a part of our culture like a malignant tumor that pokes through the skin. It’s an irrefutable problem that must be answered so that we may ascend beyond our mistakes and live comfortably with each other, face to face as one human being to another and not just as demographics.
Beyond our dismal reality, the man behind the curtain has chosen the exact stories that will create this mass hysteria for ratings. The disgusting act of how easily the media will add fuel to the fire and hit record has given us, the people, the feeling that every cop is a racist killer, a pig, a bigot, someone who doesn’t care for anyone other than themselves. Not one lick of the fair reporting that our country’s reporters were once held to in the past. Can you believe our journalism once had standards? Even celebrated? What would Walter Cronkite do? Where are the news stories about Hispanics and whites getting killed by cops? How does the mainstream media feed into this complex without a guilty conscience?
Hispanic and white slayings do not deserve more or equal media attention, but there is a question not being asked here. Not one glance from CNN or mainstream media when a Hispanic person gets gunned down because it does not generate the same emotions as when an African American gets killed. The relationships between cops and Hispanics or whites are not nearly as volatile as between cops and African Americans. N.W.A. seems more relevant today than ever, yet it does us all an injustice to be manipulated like this. There must be fair reporting to show the perversity of our anger and hate on both sides of the spectrum so we can compromise and not exile each other. It feeds into the chaotic trapeze act of race relations in America.
Race is so delicately intertwined into the lives of Americans like a shadow. We often choose to ignore it, yet know it’s something we can never escape. No nation on earth has let race affect the discourse of their history like America. Due to the greatest influx of immigrants any nation has ever seen in the history of the world, our native white population has had to adjust their lifestyles to the perceived threats from immigrants. Immigrants became our scapegoats. Look at Donald Trump, whose first speech was attacking illegal Mexican immigrants. Look how far that has gotten him today. In times of anger and frustration, immigrants, or simply any race that’s not native, is on the sharp edge of unjustified hate. There is a scared and misinformed subconscious of America guiding the belly of the beast.
It’s only been 52 years since the signing of the Civil Rights Act, and our nation has not adapted because the majority assumed everything would work itself out. Looking from the outside-in, no country has let their fate be dictated by race as much as America has. We had a war about it, brothers clashed together on the same field, bullets rippled over the heads of nurses tending the weak and wounded, a nation divided over the fate of African Americans.
The media needs to demonstrate a sense of morality by not exclusively spotlighting the fresh chalk outline of an African American. Showing that Hispanics and whites are killed by police all the same will give those who cry “pig” a second thought.
