Here’s WaPo’s headline about the woman who was shot in DC yesterday.
Interesting. That’s the main thing that the Washington Post wants you to know about her. She’s an air force veteran who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s nice. The next thing they tell you about her is that she was one of the rioters who broke a window in the Capital building, and that she was shot while she was jumping through that window.
It isn’t until two thirds of the way through the article that we learn that she was a batshit crazy Q-anon conspiracy theorist.
But she’s a veteran!
Does anyone in their right minds think that a black person (ANY black person) who gets shot by the cops get the same treatment from the media? I’m fairly certain that if she were black, the headline would have read: A woman who was shot was part of a pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol.
I didn’t see any details about her military record. I wonder if anyone tried to look at it to see if she was ever disciplined the way they always look for a criminal record when a black person is shot?
Also, did you notice the picture they used? Doesn’t she look nice? They didn’t use any of her whacky zealot MAGA pictures on her social media. How nice for her. Black people always get the mugshot, handcuffed, or generally unflattering picture treatment.
You know what else I noticed? That half the country isn’t in agreement that she deserved to get shot because; what was she doing breaking into the capital building? If she hadn’t been doing that, she would be alive today. I do see some dumb dumbs on social media saying that, but it’s not half the country the way it was with (for example) Michael Brown.
Isn’t that interesting?
To be clear, I don’t think that she deserved to be shot by the police. I don’t believe that anyone should be shot by police unless they’re shooting first. That is the only circumstance in which I would be comfortable with a cop shooting a citizen. I’m not even okay with a cop shooting someone wielding a knife. That is not equal force to neutralize an immediate threat. My position on that will not change based on who the shooting victim is.
Is my heart bleeding because this woman was shot? I’ve got to be honest, it’s not. I don’t feel an overwhelming sense of sadness over her death, but I do feel an overwhelming sense of sadness over the state of policing in America. My desire to fix the system won’t allow me to be happy about this shooting, or to even find it tolerable and I don’t care how batshit crazy she was. This isn’t about her. It’s about the next victim of a police shooting.
But I digress. The point of this post is really to show you how the media helps to shape our collective unconscious biases. We all have them, regardless of how “woke” we think we are. I have them, and I check them every single day. Our biases are largely manufactured by exactly this kind of crap, and I plan on highlighting things like more often.
