Aiyana Stanley-Jones, South Philadelphia High, and Solving the News Problem

why do the grieving faces of people on this street look so unsurprised?

and when 17-year-old Jerean Blake was killed Friday, wasn’t that equally devastating? did we do enough as a community at that moment?

do we know how to keep our children safe?

can we admit that we don’t know anything about how to be the kind of society where this could never happen?

to step back from the immediate events is to see what happens in communities who internalize the corporate military worldview that some people are expendable. the way we function as an economy that places profit first is that it’s normal for people in uniform to throw bombs into the home of civilians and shoot children.

an economy that valued people first could never justify those tactics.

i think of the children in my life – those blessed and loved and safe, and those who will never really be safe because of how the world sees them. the way aiyana died, the last minutes of her life – that is terrorism.

to know that that kind of terror and pain can happen to a child in this time – IS happening to children, funded by our tax dollars, right now, in iraq, afghanistan, palestine, arizona, and here in detroit – is to understand that as things stand, there is no justice.

Akiba Solomon, over at Colorlines, discusses the dual nature of the tragedy:

Cargill’s conflicted reaction is gut wrenching. “I’m sorry what happened to the 7-year-old child, you know my sympathy [goes] out for 7-year-old. But they knew the guy killed my son [Je'Rean Blake],” Cargill charges about the Jones family’s relationship with Owens. “Everything got started because that guy killed my son. That girl would have been living right now and my son would have been living too. … They don’t think about my son. They talk all about the 7-year-old girl. What about my son?”

This situation is too much, too sad, too unfair, too senseless to intellectualize about the moral equivalency this grieving mother is expressing. Too much, too sad, too unfair, too senseless to harp on how excessive police force—not her child’s murder by a civilian—led to the death of Aiyana. Who am I to question her anger at the lack of public focus on Je’Rean? After all, his killing should be just as aberrant as Aiyana’s—not just business as usual in the poor, Black neighborhood both children called home.

So here we all are, a week later. Facebook pages with thousands strong, hearts reaching out to families of two brown children who died at the hands of foolish predators, sloppy police work and reality-show preening. Aiyana’s in the ground, buried in a pink suit. Je’Rean laid to rest Monday.

Where are these perspectives in the mainstream media? The Stanley-Jones case, like South Philadelphia High last year, deserves better treatment. Both of these stories dealt with matters of national importance.

For Aiyana Stanley-Jones, her senseless death should have sparked a much better conversation than the rumination of reality television crews. While that area is ripe for exploration (and I would personally be interested to know if producers on cop reality shows use the same manipulative tactics as they do on regular competition shows), that should not be the only angle taken in the realm of the news. Look at the excerpts above. Police violence, state sanctioned violence, the militarization of police forces in the aftermath of 9/11, cycles of violence – there are many different angles to discuss with this story, but it appears that there is no interest in looking at those who are marked as “others.”

It was the same with South Philadelphia High School. Here was a golden opportunity to discuss some very complicated issues: the realities facing recent immigrants and children of immigrants in America, the declining state of South Philadelphia, class politics and how they create schools of last resort, the fact that many children cannot go to school in safety, the needs of overtaxed teachers for support, cycles of bullying, the declining infrastructure in urban cities — and yet, that chance was missed. A search on the New York Times website pulls up one story on South Philadelphia High, with the headline “Philadelphia: Racial Tensions at School.” The tragedy? This sole mention was a summary of an Associated Press article.

Google is doing their best to fix the news – but I am starting to wonder what parts of our current media model are worth salvaging.

Related: 5 Ways to Channel Your Aiyana Outrage

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