Our society’s sympathy for white killers

Jamelle Bouie

Slate.com

Why do white murderers receive more sympathy than black victims? asked Jamelle Bouie. “Take Mark Anthony Conditt, the 23-year-old who terrorized Austin with a series of bombings.” Instead of labeling Conditt—raised as a home-school religious conservative—a terrorist, a hater, or a mass murderer, police called him “a very challenged young man” whose confession was “an outcry” about his dysfunctional personal life. Similarly, the Associated Press described 17-year-old school shooter Austin Rollins, who murdered his ex-girlfriend in Maryland last week, as a “lovesick teenager.” If a killer is white and male, law enforcement and the media treat him as “a full individual entitled to respect and dignity”—troubled, but not evil. But black or Muslim men who kill are usually portrayed as thugs or terrorists, and their crimes are often treated as representative of their entire community. Even nonwhite victims are often portrayed negatively. Consider Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, whose typical teen experiments with marijuana were used to justify why it was right to shoot them dead in the street. “This is racism, but it’s not the crude hatred of the white supremacist.” Even in 2018, you still need to be white to be recognized as a “full person.”