I don't have the answers yet, but I have learned enough to be dangerous, and ask better questions..

This morning, I was watching MSNBC while getting my daughter ready for school. A story came on, and it got my attention. The basic elements:

On Long Island, NY, a teen wakes his father up at 11:00 PM at night because he fears some kids are going to come over and jump him. They'd been calling him, and making threats on the cell phone. Apparently they'd been arguing at a party earlier, and the dispute was still heated. The father gets up, grabs his gun, and goes in the driveway to head the angry teens off. They confront him, menacing his son, threatening both of them. The gun goes off, and one of the menacing teens is dead.

 

One human being kills another. It happens all the time, all over the world. As a parent, what would I have done? Probably not much different, except that I no longer own a gun, so other than brandishing a baseball bat, I wouldn't have had the firearm issue. I would have called the police and perhaps even gotten my daughter out of the house before the mob arrived. But does it matter? The teen is dead, and the man who shot him feels terrible over the incident, but did what he felt he needed to in order to protect his family.

 

This is not what MSNBC started off with. They started the story with 'white teens family angered because black teen's father killed him, and is only getting a light sentence.'

 

Suddenly, for the umpteenth time, I get reminded why black people get so pissed off at us.  

 

A mob of kids shows up on your lawn, drunk, angry, ready to hurt your child...and you defend your child...and why is it important that the shooter was black and the dead teen white?

 

Was that necessary? Did the news HAVE to put that in there? According to other news sources, race wasn't the problem leading up to the shooting. One human being killed another. THAT'S what happened. Why wasn't that the headline?

 

The man in question, who shot the teen fatally, is named White, and was quick to make it racial. He heard his son's fear, and remembered stories of KKK burnings of his family's property in 1920's Alabama. Fearing a mob arriving at his house about to enact more of same, he didn't call the police. He reached for his gun.

 

What was driving him? What fears and long-held assumptions constellated right at that moment and caused this particular set of actions to ensue?

 

The way the press is reporting it is an attempt to make it racially charged. What's really happened is one human being killed another, for all the wrong reasons, in a situation that was insane to begin with. Any time a mob is about to turn up at your house to do in your child...you're starting from a completely insane situation. There is little one could do that is redeeming when the field you're standing on is craziness. But this was Long Island, not Alabama. And this is 2008, not 1948. Why not just call the police?

 

Reporting it as "Black man gets light sentence for shooting white teen" is what charges it even more, makes it racial. We have to get away from language like this. It polarizes and divides. It can be said that had it been white man shooting black teen, there would be protests. Worse in my mind is that had it been black man shooting black teen, it wouldn't have made the news. Putting identity on situations contorts and confuses. We should have just started with the story that was there.

 

Teen mob threatens man's son, and he shoots one of them.

 

That was the truth.