If I should be killed on the streets of Oakland, which is extremely unlikely, but if, I want a funeral but no reporters to report on my death. Let me die in the obscurity in which I lived. I and my death are no more or less remarkable than the lives and deaths of Ta-Tanisha Franklin or Shamarr Owens or Bobby Ward, all killed in Oakland. Their obituaries were among the hundred or so funeral programs/obituaries (not published obits, but the kind they hand out at funerals) I reviewed recently, of victims whose families Marilyn had supported in the aftermath of their homicides. I’d gathered a great pile of them on a visit to the semi-abandoned post-COVID offices of the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence in West Oakland. In forty-five of those homicide cases, I could find no mention in the San Francisco Chronicle or the Oakland Tribune of their murders. Others whose obits I reviewed were mentioned once when their body was identified, maybe once more if a suspect was arrested. Rarely, unless the victim was very young or very old or white, were they described as a person who had lived, worked, loved and been loved.
Think about the last piece of news you read or saw about the killing of a young man in Oakland. What did it tell you about the victim? Did it mention what work he did? Where he’d gone to school? What NBA team he was fanatical about? What music he loved? What food? Did it mention anything about how he lived? Or only how he died. What did it tell you about the highly-charged aftermath for the victim’s loved-ones? Did it quote his mother on her pain, her anger, her fear? Did it quote his sister? A former classmate or teammate? In other words, did it attempt to present him as a complex person who had lived? Or just a person of a certain age who had died in a certain way in a certain place at a certain time.
Marilyn’s murdered son, Khadafy, has been mentioned in the news many times since he was killed, because Marilyn has been in the news for her work with and advocacy on behalf of families of homicide victims. But at the time of his death he merited only a mention in a roundup of recent homicides, and was listed as one victim in a spate of recent homicides that had inspired a task force to look into rising violence. Once Marilyn began to become locally famous, you would see mention of his role as a standout football player at McClymonds High, or perhaps a note that he was her only son. At least it was something, something more than that he died a homicide, something that, if it didn’t quite round him out as a human in full, which he was, then at least it gave a fleeting picture of the living Khadafy. If you wanted to then, you could imagine him in uniform on the field of play, surrounded by teammates, triumphant in his athleticism and victory, or smiling in the arms of his proud mom. But in August of 2000, when he was killed, there was nothing but a mention of his name. If the victims are young men of color, which most victims are, their lives are deemed to be un-newsworthy. There has been an assumption made, that readers or viewers will not be interested in knowing who they might have been. Perhaps because they think they already know.
I wonder what you'll think of this: I have always believed that white people like me felt sympathy for victims of homicide here in Oakland, and for their surviving family members, but that our sympathy had a strict time limit influenced by the assumptions we make, and that those assumptions are tinged with a form of racism as much as with ignorance and exhaustion. I believe there is an assumption that a young man of color killed in the wee hours of the morning on a Deep East Oakland street or a busy corner in West Oakland was engaged in risky behavior, probably criminal behavior, and the risk he chose to take necessarily limits the amount of sympathy he deserves. Not that he deserved to die for whatever he was doing, but that he came closer to deserving it than a mythical, white, innocent so-called bystander. And as for his mother and his family, we are aware of their pain and feel something about it, but there is a nagging thought in the back of the mind that they failed, that they are in some degree culpable for the behavior, the risk and the death of their loved one. And so our sympathy has limits of depth and time.
Some of the limits are normal and natural. We can’t suffer, mourn and grieve for strangers in the way we would for ourselves or our loved ones. Not as deeply, not for as long. If every fatal fire or highway accident affected us as if we had had a personal friend involved, we wouldn’t be able to function.
I think our attitudes and assumptions are influenced by how the deaths and lives of victims are presented in the news. The contrast between the coverage of white victims or victims killed in predominantly white areas of the city is telling.
Recently I have been reading carefully through a study of the media coverage of a year of homicides in Chicago, after which the authors concluded that “victims killed in predominantly Black neighborhoods receive less news coverage than those killed in non-Hispanic White neighborhoods. Those killed in predominantly Black or Hispanic neighborhoods are also less likely to be discussed as multifaceted, complex people.” Of course, those killed in those neighborhoods were themselves Black or Latino people. Still, dedicated as they are to their statistics, the authors are reluctant to say that the reason those killings got scant coverage was the race of the victim. They will only say that it was the predominant race of the population of the neighborhood where they were killed that seemed to determine the breadth of coverage. The authors did find that if a Black or “Hispanic” person was killed in a predominantly white neighborhood, that the incident got slightly wider coverage.
The gem I took from their study was the concept of "complex personhood." In other words, in their findings and my experience, the deaths of the victims of color are barely news, and the lives they lived are dust. And the plight of those they left behind is none of our concern, if they are Black or Latino.
On the other hand, with the influence of Black Lives Matter and the birth of more localized news outlets online, coverage of homicides has seen a mild shift. Today if you search for them, you might find stories that present the “complex personhood” of the deceased, by giving voice to the experience of survivors. Maybe that will help to create a shift in the assumptions of those of us who have never been directly affected by gun violence. But attitudes are hard to change and assumptions are so easy to make.
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