The past week has offered a case study in how race shapes empathy and blame.
Take Mark Anthony Conditt, the 23-year-old who terrorized Austin, Texas, with a series of bombings. After listening to his confession tape, local police have ruled out hate as a motive in a set of attacks that took two lives and injured several others. Conditt’s message, police chief Brian Manley
explained, was “the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his personal life.” Conditt wasn’t a terrorist—the term we usually affix to people who organize bombings—he was simply lashing out.
Or consider Austin Rollins, the 17-year-old shooter at a school in southern Maryland. He shot two students, one of them his ex-girlfriend, before he was killed. Police say “the shooting was not a random act of violence.” The girl, Jaelynn Willey, was likely the target.
Relaying this information, the Associated Press led with a small bit of editorializing: “Tuesday’s school shooting in southern Maryland that left the shooter dead and two students wounded increasingly appears to be the action of a lovesick teenager.” Not an attempted murderer or someone acting on a poisonous amount of masculine entitlement. A lovesick teenager.
Look to last month and even Nikolas Cruz—the teenage gunman who killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida—was quickly
identified as an “orphan” with a “troubled past,” a surprisingly sympathetic way to describe a deadly shooter responsible for one of the worst school massacres in American history. Beyond these recent examples are a litany of times where white suspects of violence are presented as full individuals. “Soft-spoken, polite, a gentleman” is how local media
described Elliot Rodger after he killed seven people in a 2014 murder spree near the campus of UC–Santa Barbara.
Now compare this to the
now-infamous New York Times story on Michael Brown, described as “no angel” for his occasional delinquency and dabbling in drugs and alcohol. Brown was killed in a confrontation with police. He was unarmed.
To be white, male, and suspected of a serious crime is, in the eyes of police and much of the media, to still be a full individual entitled to respect and dignity. Your actions are treated as an isolated incident, not indicative of a larger pathology shared by others who occupy your social position or hold your religious beliefs. To be black (or to be Muslim or undocumented) is to lose that nuance, even if you’re
the victim. After Trayvon Martin’s shooting death at the hands of George Zimmerman in 2012, NBC News
ran a story announcing one fact: that Martin had been suspended three times from school. In Austin, the same police who could present Mark Anthony Conditt as suffering from angst were, just a week earlier, treating his first victim—a 29-year-old black man named Anthony Stephan House—as
a suspect in his own death. “We can’t rule out that Mr. House didn’t construct this himself and accidentally detonate it,” APD Assistant Chief Joseph Chacon told reporters at the time.
