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The R. Kelly story hit at about the same time as another heartbreaking story of a victimized black girl was making headlines: Jazmine Barnes. The seven-year-old was killed when a gunman in Texas opened fire on her family’s car.
The initial suspect was white, and the immediate narrative was that this was a racist hate crime.
It is important to point out that diversity progressives like me want to put such narratives front and center. We believe that the construction of white Christian men as righteous leaders and keepers-of-the-peace as compared to the image of black, brown and Muslim men as violent criminals is deeply unjust. We point to the history of slavery, segregation, lynching, etc. as examples of systems designed by white people to oppress black people, often with the full force of the state behind them. We believe that this continues, most prevalently in how the criminal justice system functions, but also in high-profile instances of white racist murders from the bombing of a church in Birmingham during the civil rights era to the mass shooting at Mother Emmanuel just a few years back. We naturally want to highlight additional stories that underscore this worldview.
A reward was offered for bringing the white racist perpetrator of the heinous hate crime murder of Jazmine Barnes to justice. A powerful #SayHerName campaign was launched for the little girl. She became a trending topic and a diversity progressive rallying cry.
The activist Shaun King (who I generally admire, and whose work I find important) did more than anybody to bring attention to the case of Jazmine Barnes when the suspect was white.
But listen to the interview he gave to the journalist Mark Thompson in the wake of receiving the news of what actually happened.
King says in no uncertain terms that once it was reported that the murderer was white, it fit his preferred narrative of a racist hate crime. He says plainly in the interview that what principally caught his attention was not the killing, or the killed, but the race of the killer. That’s what made it worthy.
Here are his words to Mark Thompson: “We all believed that was possible … That scenario of a black family being targeted and assaulted by some type of white supremacist … it wasn’t out of the ordinary.”
The killing of a little black girl by a white man had significance and was part of a worldview. But when it turned out that the killers were black, King doesn’t spend much time looking for meaning or significance. In fact, he stops paying attention entirely.
He’s not the only one. Look at this Google chart. Interest in the case dropped precipitously when it turned out the killers were black.
Here is how I interpret the significance of the data above. The attention that Jazmine Barnes’ life and death received was linked directly to the race of her murderer. A white-skinned killer meant more sympathy for a black-skinned girl. A black-skinned killer, and the public was on to other stories.
The public, in this case, largely took its lead from activists like Shaun King, who was the individual most responsible for generating attention about the case, but only when it fit his preferred diversity progressive narrative.
In the interview I link to above, King says that when the initial sketch of the white suspect was published, his activist outfit regularly got calls from white people saying, ‘That looks like someone in my family, and that person is racist and violent and would do something like this.’
Take note of what is happening here. Shaun King (again, a writer and activist I generally admire) is very intentionally attempting to replace the ‘black men as violent’ narrative with a ‘white men as violent’ narrative and when the facts of a particular case turn out to not accord with his worldview, he cuts his losses and moves on to look for another case that might.
The point of this post – and the ‘Conversations on Diversity’ blog in general – is to raise tough intellectual questions about a worldview that I generally hold, which I call diversity progressivism. I do this because I’m an academic and I think what academics do is improve their worldviews through the rigorous process of finding disconfirming evidence and raising challenging questions.
So let’s ask some challenging questions
Should we only say the name Jazmine Barnes if her killer is white? Was the campaign principally about loving a little black girl or wanting to advance a particular worldview? Should the diversity progressive worldview be principally about loving all groups of people, or should it focus on casting particular blame on some?
