Because, you know, racism in America is over now

[drwex]

Los Angeles detectives assigned to the hit-and-run homicide of a white 18-year-old female college student on March 29, 2009: 25
Los Angeles detectives assigned to the hit-and-run homicide of a Guatemalan-American construction worker on March 29, 2009: 1

Sentences in the April 25th edition of the Washington Post reporting on a colonoscopy of a panda in that city's zoo: 20
Sentences in the April 25th edition of the Washington Post reporting on the murder of a black teenager: 2

Yeah, I got nothin'. (h/t to News of the Weird, LA Times, Washington Post, and of course Harper's)

Comments

[desiringsubject.livejournal.com]

YOu didn't get the memo about racism being over? I totally saw it on the news. It was a huge story. There were balloons. MULTICOLORED BALLOONS.

That's how you know.

Nope, totally missed that memo

[drwex]

Must've been while I was in my hole or something.

[fidgetmonster.livejournal.com]

washingtonians do love their pandas.

[c1.livejournal.com]

On the surface, the evidence does look a bit skewed, but...

In the H+R cases, how much information did the cops have to go on in either case? Did they assign more/fewer detectives to one than another because they had better/worse leads?
Not saying racism isn't at play (this is LA, after all), just looking for more data.

Also, on the colonoscopy v. murder, what was the social status of the kid? Was he well known to authorities, and therefore, less newsworthy? (Notice that newspapers tend not to highlight scumbags falling victim to their own brand of natural selection. And rightly so.)

I think you're missing the point

[drwex]

...which is that although one can dispute particular examples in the details the discussion of racism is about patterns of (unconscious) behaviors and responses.

Re: I think you're missing the point

[c1.livejournal.com]

I didn't miss that point at all: rather, I'm seeing things from my own experiences. Having worked as an EMT, I saw a few patterns-- namely that a certain subset of people were members of the Friday Night Knife and Gun Club. To this day, whenever I see newspaper headlines that a young man got killed, my first question is "did the victim know his attacker, and if so, should the victim have had a reasonable sense that his activities could have him end up in the coroner's office?" and this happens regardless of race. I saw roughly equal numbers of blacks/whites/Asians/Latinos in the back of my ambulance on Friday nights.
Most often, after a little more reading, I tend to answer "yes", and also, I notice the story is lighter on details than if the story was about an innocent victim. And frankly, this difference in coverage sits fine with me: I have far less concern for the history of a kid who consciously decided to screw up his life.
Now, if the stories are about innocent victims, and one has more details than the other, then yes, there's something to be said about that disparity.

To the panda story, I'm also fine knowing much more about them: a recent story mentioned that some experts predict they'll be extinct within our lifetimes. Human beings have no such burden of survival.