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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   42629 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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I'm mildly surprised that I haven't yet seen talking heads complaining about the coverage of the murder and protesting that "black women also get murdered and nobody cares," etc. (This may be happening but I have yet to read it personally.)

Years ago when I first heard of "missing white woman syndrome" coined I guess 20 years ago by a TV anchor, I thought "Hm, that's interesting." But it's less-and-less interesting to me now. Now, whenever I hear people throw it out it seems to be yet another tedious effort to downplay criminality and make every god-damned thing a zero-sum-game involving race.

"missing white woman syndrome"

I'm not sure the implied criticism by this is wrong: the media really does spend disproportionate air time on "cute" victims (Natalee Holloway got a lot of press coverage). See this thread happening now, and not for Debrina Kawam who was lit on fire and killed by an illegal immigrant: the latter was homeless at the time. (Or a recent stabbing murder on a bus in my city. Or the guy arrested recently for threatening bus passengers with a machete.) There really is less media coverage of crimes against Black victims for what I see as complex and circular reasons: for better or worse, nobody really cares about murders in "the hood" and they're hardly rare, so there is comparatively little advocacy for actually stopping it (similarly, "gun violence" advocates care a lot more about school shootings, and seemingly almost not at all about inner-city gang violence) --- and what advocacy there is ends up ineffective IMO partially because it politically ignores some of the causes of that violence, although in the past it's maybe swung the other direction in being callously ham-fisted. I don't think the problems here, or the solutions to it, are easy. And so the cycle continues.

IMO the headline-worthiness bias of "man bites dog" really does the world a disservice by skewing perceptions of the world. If you only follow the news and don't go outside, you'd think dogs were really at high risk of man-bites.

There really is less media coverage of crimes against Black victims for what I see as complex and circular reasons: for better or worse, nobody really cares about murders in "the hood"

No new thing; from the 1940 novel "Farewell, My Lovely" by Raymond Chandler where a policeman is disappointed to be the one lumbered with a killing (by a white guy) of the black manager of a bar, because he needs a big case and nobody cares about this sort of crime (warning for period language, as per the best publications*):

A man named Nulty got the case, a lean-jawed sourpuss with long yellow hands which he kept folded over his kneecaps most of the time he talked to me. He was a detective-lieutenant attached to the 77th Street Division and we talked in a bare room with two small desks against opposite walls and room to move between them, if two people didn't try it at once. Dirty brown linoleum covered the floor and the smell of old cigar butts hung in the air. Nulty's shirt was frayed and his coat sleeves had been turned in at the cuffs. He looked poor enough to be honest, but he didn't look like a man who could deal with Moose Malloy.

He lit half of a cigar and threw the match on the floor, where a lot of company was waiting for it. His voice said bitterly:

"Shines. Another shine killing. That's what I rate after eighteen years in this man's police department. No pix, no space, not even four lines in the want-ad section."

…Nulty spit in the wastebasket again. "I'll get him," he said, "about the time I get my third set of teeth. How many guys is put on it? One. Listen, you know why? No space. One time there was five smokes carved Harlem sunsets on each other down on East Eighty-four. One of them was cold already. There was blood on the furniture, blood on the walls, blood even on the ceiling. I go down and outside the house a guy that works on the Chronicle, a newshawk, is coming off the porch and getting into his car. He makes a face at us and says, 'Aw, hell, shines,' and gets in his heap and goes away. Don't even go in the house."

*"The original short stories reprinted in the British Library Tales of the Weird series were written and published in a period ranging across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are many elements of these stories which continue to entertain modern readers; however, in some cases there are also uses of language, instances of stereotyping and some attitudes expressed by narrators or characters which may not be endorsed by the publishing standards of today. We acknowledge therefore that some elements in the stories selected for reprinting may continue to make uncomfortable reading for some of our audience."

Would be hard to pull off with people sharing "George Floyd vs. Iryna Zarutska search result hits" memes.

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