randomWalks

I thought it seemed odd that there were so many reports, especially with the whole Westerfield trial going on here. That almost seemed like the spark for it all.

These are tragic times. It's not like the past when only cute little blond girls were abducted.

I've been saying privately for a while now that the 'child abduction' thing, which goes back at least to Susan Smith, though it has intensified lately, is deeply racist.



I simply cannot recall -- and I would love to be corrected about this -- a single instance of a national news story being constructed from a non-white child 's abduction, and yet we surely know that non-white children are abducted, and we can assume that that are done so in a

way which is equally newsworthy as the abduction of white children. (Or equally not newsworthy, depending on how you see these things).



If the white-child abduction story craze signals the slightest interest in the welfare of children (and I do not think that it does), then it would be reasonable to assume the news media would do daily stories about the systematic (as opposed to episodic) maltreatment of children of color in every urban ghetto in the U.S., as well as the plight of children in border town maquiladoras, and so on.



The only time I can recall the deaths of non-white children being made into a national story was the Atlanta child killings of the early 1980s (I think it was the early 80s...). Even the news media couldn't ignore that many dead children, especially when the police ultimately arrested a black man for the murders (and there is ongoing controversy about whether he could be responsible for all of them).



Call this the white, racialized privilege of having one's pain count, of, that is, being the right kind of victim.

Elian Gonzalez was a major story, but that's not really the same ballpark as we're talking about here. My confusion (question) around what you just wrote, which I agree with is how you come to the assessment that this is privilege. I'm serious with this. To me this is racism. A child of color disappears = not news. White child disappears = news. It seems like a pretty clear choice is being made by news outlets on this and it seems pretty clearly racially motivated. The problem I've always had with the concept of privilege is that I don't understand where racism ends and white privilege begins. Moreover, I think the material, societal costs of racism far outweigh the benefits in the "knapsack."

Y'all, this is old news. Crimes against white children have been getting more press than crimes against non-white children for ages now. Wasn't there an adorable black girl in Chicago raped and beaten (and maybe murdered - I can't remember. sad) at around the same time Jon Benet was murdered? Do I even need to mention JB's last name? No. Have many of us heard of the other little girl? No.

This past Christmas a biracial baby was kidnapped at a Chicago bus station. That was network-newsworthy.

Over the summer in Philadelphia a young black girl was kidnapped (and she escaped her kidnappers) and that was in the news. Not for long, since she did escape and get home to safety. The thing with most of the kids in the news lately is that, sadly, they have not made it home.



The bottom line is that they're putting the story on the evening news, because they think that's what you want to see. Write to the editors at CNN and tell them you want to see more stories about black or hispanic children being beaten to death if that's what you want. I personally want to see fewer stories about ANY children being kidnapped/murdered/missing, and to make that happen I turn off the news. I don't click on those articles when they're up on the news sites. Vote with your remote, your mouse, and your e-mail account.

There's Yukun Jia.

i think at least two of the last three children were



hispanic, african-american, and chinese.



i think that you're not seeing the whole string.



and if this stuff is reported like child abuse, then this stuff has been going on far longer than the recent "spate" of events.

i'm sorry, i meant african-american OR chinese.



but then again, there was that Chinese girl who left for the East coast when her family landed in California.



i don't think that the abduction thing is deeply racist.

Write to the editors at CNN and tell them you want to see more stories about black or hispanic children being beaten to death if that's what you want.



Gee, talk about missing the point. Sheesh. I would have thought I would *never* need to say this, but here goes: No, I wasn't saying I want to see more stories on network news about "black or hispanic children being beaten to death".



How absurd.

It seems like a pretty clear choice is being made by news outlets on this and it seems pretty clearly racially motivated. The problem I've always had with the concept of privilege is that I don't understand where racism ends and white privilege begins.



Yeah, that's a hard thing to do, I think because it's the wrong question to ask. The privilege here is the perpetuation of the idea that the pain of white people *counts*, i.e., that it's the sort of thing that, for example, others should attend to, that it's the sort of thing that the government ought to respond to. That it matters, politically and morally and culturally. That it's the sort of thing that contributes to the national culture.



Privilege is always a matter of difference or differential advantage across whole groups; that is, in a society full of human pain and suffering, (or, to the put the matter pointedly, in a society which is so sick that children of all kinds are regularly abducted) it's a boon, an extra, a perque that one's privilege counts for something publicly. That one's suffering is publicly redeemable.



You can see this pretty clearly in the way race riots are treated in this country. The pain of those who lived through, for example, the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (in which white Tulsans and the police and the National Guard literally destroyed the African American section of Tulsa) simply does not count. The state legislature in Oklahoma simply will not let it count by, for example, responding to it appropriately.



Contrast that with the way the survivors of the OKC Bombing are treated, particularly the way media (that is, political) representations of them were constructed: the face of victims of the OKC Bombing is a *white* face; their pain counts, the government listens and responds appropriately. (In fact, Ashcroft pandered to them in the way he arranged the death of McVeigh.)



And that's one small example; compare, for example, the way the movement to win reparations for the victims and descendants of American apartheid is represented in the media with the way the victims and survivors of the 9-11 attacks, particularly their recent lawsuit for trillions of dollars, are represented. The latter is something to take seriously; the former is something to make jokes about.



So, racism and privilege are not easily distinguishable; the former is the practice and ideology which secures and maintains and defends the latter. And the latter is the impetus for perpetuating racist ideology and practice.

kendall,



well said!



but the face of the OKC bombing is not entirely white.



native americans were killed, too. and that should show how doubly horrific their murders were. living in a state that their ancestors marched to from the southeastern united states. working in the building that managed that state. dying there by the hands of a "white" terrorist.

but the face of the OKC bombing is not entirely white.



native americans were killed, too. and that should show how doubly horrific their murders were. living in a state that their ancestors marched to from the southeastern united states. working in the building that managed that state. dying there by the hands of a "white" terrorist.



No, this is a perfectly reasonable point, but let me clarify. I'm not talking about the actual list of victims of the OKC Bombing (just as I wasn't talking about the actual victims of these child abductions). Rather, I'm talking about the political representations (think bell hooks!) of the OKC Bombings and the spate of child abductions.



Sure, many non-whites were killed in the OKC Bombing: African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and so on. But in the aftermatch, in the public coming to terms with what happened, in the political and cultural representations of the victims, white faces (and concerns and fears and issues and interests and stories) have utterly dominated.



I have occasionally seen a non-white survivor or family member of a victim in connection with an OKC Bombing story in the media. But the favored survivors or victim family members are uniformly white, in a way that is not accidental in my view.



Anyway, that's what I meant when I said that the child abduction "story" -- i.e., political, cultural, and moral representation -- is deeply racist and a reflection of a deep and deeply racialized privilege.



Representations are tricky things; in some sense they don't matter at all, and in another sense they matter a great deal.

and here's a troubling and complicated representation story.



on the day of the bombing timothy mcveigh backed the ryder truck into the space in front of the Murrah building. no one seemed to notice that there was smoke from two two minute fuses snaking their flaming way through the cab of the truck.



he walked away, and three people saw him, and said nothing. maybe nothing seemed weird to them.



he was stopped 72 miles away just south of kansas by a white state trooper who saw him and questioned why the car had no plates. that white state trooper was helping a black family in a mini van on the side of the road.



the only thing that was troubling for the officer was that timothy mcveigh said, "I have a gun in my left shoulder holster. it's loaded."



at the jail, when they took off mcveigh's jacket, he was wearing an interesting shirt. on the back of hte shirt was a quote by jefferson, "every once in a while the tree of freedom must be watered with the blood of revolutionaries."



here is what's interesting to me about the whole thing. mcveigh was in that jail for almost twenty four hours before anyone even considered that he might be a suspect.



they were obviously looking for *others*. but here's what is equally striking to me:



mcveigh was held in the same prison as the Unabomber and an Arab terrorist who masterminded the WTC first bombing, and all three of them became friends. they shared a story that was totally against representational government, technology, and the sins of the fathers being passed on to the sons. they seem to operate in a community of equals that was built out of a dissatisfaction with the construction of power.



would it make sense to believe that mcveigh's execution was meant to appease *white* people just becasuse of their pain and grievance? or would it be better to say that it was done to appease the *white* sense of solidity in goverment? OR, in the traditions of the esteemable George Bush, was it done only to punish those who had hurt those Ashcroft knew personally?



Some say that the thoughts about war in Iraq are simply the Bushians plots to get back at enemies they have made through personal financial dealings.



it makes sense when you consider that Ross Perot only ran against Bush because he personally hated the man.



kendall, i don't want to say that you are looking at a very simplified vision of representation. but, you know, there were plenty of *white* people who opposed killing mcveigh, just as they oppose killing anyone who has done anything horrendous and received capital punishment.



are you suggesting that the treatment mcveigh received was simply to pander to white victims? how come they didn't kill the unabomber? or the muslim terrorist who blew up the basement of the world trade center?



is it simply a question of representation? or, and I hand this to you with openness, has the problem of representation become the operation of political and governmental and criminal justice decisions?



to me the problems seem to myriad and nuanced, especially given the story of the bombings and the acts of child theft, to seem the symptom of representation.



then again, might i be using my *whiteness* to *whitewash* the problems of authority and control? even as i think, and reflect, using what I feel is logic and questioning?



the limitations of any kind of representation are embedded in the representation of the problem itself, right?



and i could be missing the point, as i see what the point is, but it's hard to get my head around it.

Kacyzinski didn't get the death penalty because his brother made an agreement w/ the government as a condition of his turning Kacyzinski in. That's not a relevant counter example.



The point I was making, again, is the differential treatment: 9-11 lawsuits are taken as a serious, even heroic response to tragedy; attempts to gain reparations for African American descendants of slaves and others are taken as, at best, a joke and, at worst, proof of the character defects of black people. Or, again, as I pointed out, Ashcroft bends over backwards to respond to the OKC Bombings; and the state of Oklahoma (and the fed. gov't) treats attempts by African American survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot (that is, a *white* race riot) with contempt and scorn.



Let me put it this way: I'm at a loss to know to what other social factor to ascribe these differences if not racist practice and ideology.