Just over two weeks ago, a brutal Al Qaeda attack ravaged the Grand Bassam beach resort in Côte d’Ivoire, a small country on the Western coast of Africa. Following the breakout of civil war in 2002, violence has proliferated throughout Côte d’Ivoire, but this attack sent shockwaves throughout its citizens. At least 16 people were killed – but that’s still a relatively small number compared to what’s been happening elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East.
When we talk about international terrorism, we’ve been primarily talking about the First World European countries: Brussels, France, and the like. We’re not talking about the people being brutally massacred throughout the non-white, non-Western world – Pakistan, Yemen, Côte d’Ivoire, Iraq, and others. I’m not saying this to discredit or invalidate the horror of recent terror attacks in Europe – I’m just saying that if you’re going to upload a cute Instagram with the #PrayForBrussels hashtag, you’d better be prepared to #pray for the thousands of innocent people worldwide who are dying without a storm of media coverage to commemorate their deaths.
So, to fill in the last couple of weeks for you: on March 13, just over a week before the Brussels attack, an Al Qaeda attack on Grand-Bassam left 16 people dead. On March 20 in Anbar, Iraq, 30 were killed in a suicide bombing. March 25 saw 26 casualties in Aden and 29 in Iskandariya. Just a week ago in Pakistan, 72 people were killed in a suicide bombing – more than twice the number of people who died in the Brussels attack. And yet, the American and global media coverage of these events was minimal compared to the attention devoted to Paris and Brussels. And again, I’m not trying to discredit what’s been happening in Europe, because any loss of innocent life is a tragedy. I’m just saying that if we’re assigning terrorism a body count, those bodies can’t just be white.
My second point is a bit of a shift, considering that most of the above attacks were committed by Muslim extremists, but it still needs to be said: you’re more likely to be killed by a white person in America than by a Muslim. White people – primarily men – commit 64 percent of mass shootings in America. And as far as terrorism – strictly ideological violence - you’re still more likely to be killed by a right-wing white terrorist in America than by a Muslim extremist. It's the same deal in the European Union: less than 2 percent of terrorist attacks conducted in the last five years have been ‘religiously motivated' or attributable to Muslim extremism.
And yet the U.S. pours billions of dollars into our defense budget, purportedly to protect ourselves against international terrorist attacks, without ever acknowledging that the greatest threats to the lives of American people are within our borders. So why aren’t we working harder to tighten gun regulations? Why aren’t we working to improve education for high-risk youth and prevent them from reverting to crime? Why aren’t we trying to change a cultural narrative that accepts and even encourages violence and dominance in young men? If we actually want to defend Americans from terrorism, we need to be siphoning those billions of dollars into education, healthcare, and infrastructure – not just the defense budget.
These two points are indicative of a larger phenomenon: one in which white perpetrators are excused and sympathized with on the grounds of their mental health or their tough childhood, and in which non-white victims are rendered invisible by the mass media. As far as we’ve come as a country, there’s still a powerful racial bias in American media. It’s evident in our disproportionate focus on white victims and on non-white perpetrators, a bifurcation that’s constantly magnified and distorted. And it’s never so much outright dishonesty as a lie by omission, a refusal to say what’s really been happening. And it’s about time we started telling the whole story.
