How come nobody reports on drivebys at schools in Oakland or Chicago?
Why are these “shocking” school shootings only at white, upper-middle-class or rural schools?
Are we to believe that black kids don’t have school shootings? Or that they’re not newsworthy.
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It’s not just Chicago. There are shootings at schools nationwide, daily. It’s news when a student gets hit. They don’t cover it unless someone gets hit. And it’s a one-day story unless someone dies. Breaks my heart.
Also, three deadly shootings in a week IS on the unusual side. I think we can guarantee this will stay front-page.
The one that truly was ignored was a shooting last year (I think) that killed only one less student than Columbine. The shooter also was a student. Why wasn’t it on TIME magazine’s cover? It was on a Native American reservation. Those schools are NEVER news.
Drive bys are on the local news here all the time. I don’t think we’ve ever had an actul “school shooting” though, in the sense that an armed person has just entered the school and started wiping people out. Not since I’ve lived in the Chicagoland Area anyway.
I still remember Laurie Dann, but that was probably before your time.
I dunno. I just assumed that Black people generate an aura of love and peace around them that makes it difficult for such things to happen in their presence, while white teenagers generate an aura of irritability that makes you want to smack them and some people go too far.
That’s not it?
I think the difference, whether real of perceived, is the motivations. Everyone can understand a gang-related shooting (which most drivebys are), and they’re common enough to not be news. Note that when a non-gang member is hit by these kinds of attacks it DOES become a major news story – remember the guy who was killed last year right before he left for a football scholarship (I think it was in SF) because he was mistaken for a gang member.
By contrast, the shootings in most white schools seem on the surface to be out of the blue, revealing problems that had been kept out of the public eye. It’s also the “novelty” of it, particularly in places where no violence had occurred previously. I’m noticing that school shootings, which once grabbed headlines, are starting to be reported less and less prominently – the novelty is wearing off and now they’re starting to just fade into the background noise of this fucked up world we live in.
The school shootings that get the most publicity are either high body count, committed by an outsider, or aggravated in some way (by rape, by additional kinds of victimization, by happening within the school, by type of victim and/or killer).
There’s a ladder of perceived value of lives, which I’m sure any reader can construct. Dead little white girls are high on that ladder. Which is paradoxical, since living little girls generally are less valuable (get less attention and fewer resources) than their brothers.
If a school in Oakland had a massacre, it might or might not be covered in detail — but someone deliberately murdering all those little Amish girls (remember, the Amish are pacifists) is newsworthy. And heartbreaking.
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