When Death Can’t Turn a Profit: The Selective Compassion of the White World
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/iraq-baghdad-bombings-kill-23-160703045945293.html
So let me get this straight…..Well as straight as I can.
In mid-June, a nightclub full of Black and Brown Trans and Queer Folks gets shot up, which is obviously an act of terror, performed by a bigoted and closeted person from the US, who claimed ties to an extremist group. For a brief moment, it seemed like the white people of this planet cared, and not just cared, were motivated to do something about it. People rushed to blood banks they couldn’t donate in. Filters popped up like viruses across the Internet. There were vigils and tributes around the world, and rightfully so. When tragedy strikes, it’s supposed to be a time where we as human beings come together. It’s the right thing to do.
So why, when a suicide bomber takes out more than 200 people in Baghdad less than a month later, are we struggling to find news coverage about the event? Simple, there’s no profit in it for white people to care about mass Brown people overseas getting killed.
Over time, the genocide of people has been hand picked by the Western world, valid only in moments where there’s a valuable story involved, one that will boost ratings and give reporters clout as “progressive media that cares about the people.” Over time, that’s also repeatedly proven itself to be a careless act of negligence, which makes it so an attack that took 4 times as many people as Orlando (so far), has barely made any headlines. It is why Goddess Diamond’s death only made the news because a Black Trans woman found the information first. It’s why 300 Black Women in Africa can be kidnapped by a group of extremist people, and only make the news long enough for people to talk about them, but not long enough to actually find them. It is why we only get done with mourning our dead, to we discover more of them, dead that will only make the headlines relevant, but never revolutionary.
The white world chooses, and I will say that emphatically, CHOOSES, the people who’s lives are worthy of their screens, podcasts, videos, etc. As long as we are a marketable thing that can be used to boost a “news” network’s reputation, our deaths are valid. This is an obvious lack of empathy, not just in the so called, “United States,” but the entirety of the Western World, that claims progress and forward thinking on the backs and lives of Non-Western people.
To be honest, for me, I’d like to see fewer white people on the “news,” talking about issues that will never apply to them as much as the Black & Brown messengers of the information; information that burns our bodies in grief, every single time we witness one of our own die, no matter what side of the ocean they’re on. Why this constant emphasis on us being unable to speak for ourselves? At least if we were to have some control over our narratives, we’d know a lot more of what’s going on for longer. We might be able to provide support better, if our struggles both here and abroad weren’t being spaced out into storyboard cutouts for ratings. Our lives, deaths, and everything that comes with them, surely mean more than that.
It’s time to stop using the pain of marginalized groups of people as a marketing scheme that will only fade away, like the lives of all these people, in articles shoddily written by “reporters” with white skin and the inability to understand oppressed people as human. These people matter, whether or not white people care.
