If you pay attention to the news, then you’re probably familiar with the death of Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old girl in Chicago who was murdered by two young men earlier this week. The media got a lot of high-profile people to comment, which painted the tragic picture of her death as a story of a “good girl from a bad area.”
Obviously, the death of a child is tragic. Perhaps not so obvious, however, is the structural inequality the media perpetuates by focusing on how she was exceptional and making her death seem as random as death by lightning strike.
This week in my media theory class, we read a relevant piece by John D. Marquez entitled, “The Black Mohicans: Representations of Everyday Violence in Postracial Urban America.” Marquez explains his argument using examples of the bloody savage and the noble savage from the novel, “The Last of the Mohicans,” which you may be familiar with from seventh grade English class. Essentially, American minorities can be separated into two groups that have existed since colonial America: the “noble savage,” who possess middle class traits and lead to the success stories, or the “bloody savage,” who is uncivilized and violent.
Marquez applies this concept to contemporary Chicago and argues the idea that “black success stories,” such as Oprah, Michael Jordan or President Barack Obama, give a false sense of a “post-racial” society that is suddenly equal and just. It allows society to pretend racism isn’t an issue anymore.
According to the Chicago Reporter, more than 530 people under 21 have been killed in Chicago since 2008. The majority of these deaths take place in black and Latino neighborhoods on the South Side. But if those youth aren’t honors students with traditional middle-class values, there are no national figures being asked to comment in outrage and sadness about their deaths, no promises of reform arise, and we go on believing “they” live like that because that’s how “they” are.
One of the most important aspects of learning to view media with a critical eye is catching the incorrect assumptions that are sometimes just a lot easier to rely on than reality. Rather than accepting that gang violence “just is,” it’s crucial to understand cultural history and implications.
Marquez writes that many urban gangs were created in response to white supremacy gangs in mid-20th century that used terror to enforce segregation practices. The gangs were a method of protection that law enforcement didn’t, and perhaps still doesn’t, provide. However, the media has always presented them as needlessly violent and chaotic. There are television shows romanticizing white gang violence as preserving some kind of order, but we don’t see the same for black or Latino gangs.
Structural inequality, such as poor schools or limited access to health care, further reinforces cultural inequality. There are youth groups in Chicago now that realize their disadvantage and are attempting to work within the white, middle class framework to achieve their goals. A couple weeks ago, a group of Chicagoan youth staged a peaceful protest at the University of Chicago asking them to build a trauma center in their neighborhood. Because there isn’t an accessible hospital in the area for youth over 16, people have died needlessly.
The group was violently pushed out of the hospital, though, and the problem of unequal access to trauma care remains in place. A group established to work against this kind of disadvantage, Fearless Leading by the Youth, [released a statement]( http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/2013/01/27/peaceful-protesters-are-violently-arrested-for-demanding-access-to-healthcare/) noting, “health care in our country is about profit, not about helping people who need it. That’s why the violence is so bad, because we don’t have what we need to survive. We live in neighborhoods where there’s no resources, no jobs, no youth programs, no mental health services, and the little they had they are taking away.”
Again, it’s a tragedy that the young girl died in a shootout that had nothing to do with her personally. We should definitely be talking about her death, but we can’t gloss over it as a random tragedy when violence is so common. Rather than pushing greater policing, gun control and oppression, perhaps it is time that the groups living there are heard when they try to tell the government and institutions what they need.