Last Friday, a gunman attacked and kidnapped four Black Americans in Matamoros, Mexico. On Tuesday, two of the four group members were found dead. One day after that, Black people were reminded that we’re not actually allowed to be victims.
On Wednesday, The Daily Mail published an article that didn’t focus on the violent killings of two group members or the horrific trauma experienced by the survivors. Instead, the fine folks at the right-wing U.K.-based tabloid thought it was appropriate to point out, in the largest, boldest print possible, that all four victims had “lengthy criminal records” mostly for drug-related infractions. None of them had been charged with violent crimes.
For the sake of empathy, compassion and basic humanity, I’m not going to go into detail regarding the criminal histories of each victim the way the Daily Mail did. All I’ll mention is that not all of the victims had “lengthy” records because one or two drug charges do not make a lengthy rap sheet. I’ll also say that all the crimes the victims were convicted of occurred the better part of a decade ago and, in one case, more than two decades ago when the victim was a juvenile. Finally, I’ll mention that for Shaeed Woodard, one of the two victims who died after the shooting and kidnapping, the charge that was the most highlighted in the Mail’s article was for possession of marijuana.
As far as I can tell, the only real point of this article was to give racist white people an excuse to be racist white people.
It would be disheartening if it wasn’t so typical to see white folks on Twitter sarcastically comment that they’re “shocked” to learn of the victims’ criminal pasts with one commenter even going so far as to say, “Took one look at them and assumed as much, 50% success maybe.”
And while that commenter appears to pull statistics straight from the White Supremacist Book of Justifying Racism, actual data either shows…
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