Another Day in the Death of America

by Gary Younge

Audry had worried for some time that what at first sight may have looked like an easygoing manner masked a deeper fragility. Samuel was dyslexic, and the early years of school had not been easy. “The handwriting,” she says, listing the basics he’d struggled with. “Not catching on with the other kids. He was tired of going to summer school every year. The teacher always calling and saying, ‘He needs help, he needs help, he needs help.’ That took a toll on him emotionally and gave him low self-esteem,” she says. “He was quiet and reserved. He didn’t make friends easily. When he was younger he didn’t like the sports. He didn’t like the touching and the hitting. He was so sensitive he would always cry. He seemed desperate to please everybody.” When he was around ten he told a counselor that he sometimes thought of hurting himself. The counselor recommended an evaluation, and after a few tests doctors suggested admitting him to a psychiatric ward.

  That proved too big a step for Samuel. “He cried,” says Audry. “Whitney cried. She didn’t want him to go, and he didn’t want to stay [at the hospital]. He didn’t want to be away from Whitney or me. They felt like it was jail because of course they take your belt, your shoelaces, all of that. So they let him do the outpatient thing, where he would come in the morning and stay all day.”

  As he grew into his teens, he became more confident. He wanted to be a policeman. “From a young age, that had been his obsession,” says Audry. “He loved cop shows—Criminal Minds, Cops, whatever was on. He even had a police app on his phone so he could track their activities.” When he was fifteen, Audry moved Whitney and him from a big school with more than three thousand students to a new, smaller school in the northeastern suburb of Richardson, near her work, in the hope that he would get more hands-on attention. He campaigned for the vice presidency of the student council, an elected position that demanded going to each class to canvass for votes. He pledged to get a basketball team off the ground, and he won. A team duly followed, although, because the school was so small, it played in a city league rather than against other local schools.

  The first response in the comments section after the Dallas Morning News piece ran online came from one of Samuel’s schoolmates. He called himself Parker Moore and identified himself as the student-council president of Samuel’s school. He wrote, “He’s a great kid and a go-getter. He was definitely going places in life. I last talked with him just on Monday about our ideas for a student council fundraiser. I can hardly believe this is really happening. Rest in peace, friend.”

  Samuel didn’t have much of a social life beyond school and family, though he did have a girlfriend. He was basically a homebody. “He loved playing his video games,” says Audry. “He wasn’t an outdoor person. He loved his BB gun. He loved something to shoot at. But he never went anywhere. And if he went anywhere it was with me or Whitney.” For most of Samuel’s life, it seems, those closest to him did their best to protect him from both the tenderest parts of himself and the toughest elements of the outside world.

  SUCH WAS THE BRIEF life whose death received such short shrift in the Dallas media. The woman who wrote the eighty-one-word account of Samuel’s death for the Dallas Morning News is Melissa Repko, a young, engaging reporter whom I met at a hipster coffee shop in a gentrifying part of town. Melissa occasionally worked Sundays on the crime blog. It’s a shift with a macabre but predictable routine and a busy start. “If something’s going to happen then it will usually happen between the hours of midnight and four a.m.,” she says. “The kind of time when your mother tells you nothing good happens.” Shootings, drunk drivers, and domestic violence are the staples from the Saturday night before. “There’s a police database that I go to, and then I make calls. I search for murders, sudden deaths, aggravated assaults,” she says. “It’s pretty common to have at least one shooting, although they’re not always fatal.”

  Two months after Samuel’s murder she still remembered the case as much for what was not in the report as what was. “I did remember it only because he was so young and it’s quite rare they have no indication of there being criminal activity.” It was her task to record it, not to follow it up. So when the day was done, she’d hand the story over to the regular crime team, who take up the weekend stories they think are worth running with. Samuel’s death didn’t make the cut.

  That didn’t surprise Repko. Indeed it would surprise very few. Pleasant Grove, the area where Samuel was shot, is poor, black, and located on the south side of Dallas; it is disparagingly known as “Unpleasant Grove.” As one of Samuel’s teachers said, “If it had happened in Richardson [the location of his school], people would have been in shock. But in real far south in Dallas, that’s not unusual.” Had she ever been there? “I don’t go down that way,” the teacher said. “That’s not a safe area for a white woman.” Evidently, it was not a safe area for a young black man either.

  Shootings were common there, confirmed Repko. “People are desensitized to it. They reason that’s just where bad things happen.” I heard this refrain often when talking to the journalists who’d covered that day’s shootings. Clearly, I was the only one who had called them to follow up on the story. They would kindly rifle through their notes and tell me what they knew and, if they’d been to the crime scene, what they had seen. Invariably, when I asked if they had any contact details for family members, or if there had been any developments in the investigation, they would explain, somewhat matter-of-factly, why they had moved on. “Unfortunately, homicides are not uncommon in that area,” said one. “Unless something unexpected happened it just wouldn’t be the kind of story we’d follow up on,” said another.

  As a journalist myself I understand this. I have no idea what happened to Jesus Josef, an eight-year-old Haitian boy whom I met in the Dominican Republic in 2005. He turned up at a refugee center with his neck twisted from carrying heavy loads and his shoulders bearing welts from mistreatment by the family who had bought him and used him as a domestic slave. Nor do I know the fate of Kulo Korban, whom I met in Sierra Leone in 1998 and who’d had both his ears and three fingers amputated by rebels in the conflict there. After a week spent reporting from each place, I moved on.

  I write this with neither pride nor guilt. There is a level of detachment inherent, and arguably necessary, in the profession. Without it, one would become emotionally depleted. Moreover, one is constantly gauging what more there is to say and who would be listening if you said it. Outlets have limited resources. Editors have to justify budgets for keeping you in a certain place or sending you back to trace each individual story, which in turn must be balanced against what other new stories you might be missing. Journalism is not social work. And even social workers, to be effective, must move on. That said, these are little more than rationalizations for how I, and other journalists, exercise our relative power. We choose whose stories are told, whom we go back to, and where our resources are deployed. And those choices are not objective. They are made on the basis of what stories we subjectively consider are worthy of being told at any given time. The fact that most media outlets are commercial enterprises is of course a factor. The more a story costs and the less likely it is to bring in readers (and therefore revenue), the less likely institutions are to invest resources in it. But it is not the only factor and generally not the most important.

  Even without the profit motive, news values are not human values. If they were, the front-page story of every newspaper and the leading item on every bulletin would be “Child Dies of Hunger.” But since we know that millions in the world don’t have enough to eat and that at any given time a child somewhere may perish from malnourishment, it is not deemed news. In all likelihood a newspaper that decided to run that headline every day would sell precious few copies.

  “We’ve got compassion fatigue, we say, as if we have involuntarily contracted some kind of disease that we’re stuck with no matter what we do,” says Susan Moeller in her study of responses to the reporting of atrocities. She argues that it is avoidance, not fatigue, that averts our gaze.11<
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  In States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering, Stanley Cohen contends that the avoidance comes from a lack of empathy: “The problem with multiple images of distant suffering is not their multiplicity, but their psychological and moral distance. Repetition just increases the sense of their remoteness from our lives. These are not our children; we have no bond with them; we can never experience their presence; all we know about them is that they exist for that dislocated thirty seconds during which the camera focused on them.”12

  The fact that sections of the public don’t want to know about certain kinds of repetitive suffering does not make the fact that the media does not report on it less problematic. First, it is to some degree a self-fulfilling prophecy. By failing to report child hunger consistently we cease to think about it and come to accept it as an unfortunate, intractable fact of life. Since it’s unlikely to be reported, it’s less likely to be discussed. The less we talk about children starving, the less we talk about why they starve and what we might do to feed them, and the less public pressure there is on politicians to address starvation.

  Second, this reasoning comes with a set of assumptions on behalf of those who make editorial decisions about who “we” are and what “we” want to know and what “we” think “we” know already. This is where the distance comes in. The further you are from experiencing child hunger or from knowing anyone who has experienced it, the less likely you are to see it as a priority or to see its victims as newsworthy. Put bluntly, a child dying of hunger is a far more newsworthy event for those who know the child than for those who don’t and are never likely to. That does not negate the ability to empathize, analyze, and engage beyond one’s immediate experience. It simply recognizes the distance between subject and object.

  “The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event,” wrote Walter Lippmann in his landmark book, Public Opinion. “That is why until we know what others think they know, we cannot truly understand their acts. . . . Our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe. They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported.”13

  News values are not an objective account of the most important things that have happened in any given time and place. They are the sum total of the priorities and received wisdom of those who provide the news. And those who provide the news are not a representative group. In 2013, the median personal income in the United States was $28,031;14 30.4 percent of people in the nation have degrees; racial minorities comprise 39 percent of the population and 58 percent of those who live in poverty.15 American journalists earn a median salary of $50,028; 8.5 percent of them are from minorities; 92 percent have degrees.16 Newsrooms are considerably whiter, wealthier, and better educated than the population in general.

  So when it comes to covering gun violence, those most likely to frame the news agenda are therefore not the same as those most likely to be affected by the issue. Journalists are less likely to live in the neighborhoods where such violence takes place. Their opinions about those areas are “pieced together out of what others [with the same privileges as themselves] have reported” and then further amplified.

  When the Dallas Morning News won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for its series on the divide between North and South Dallas, Tom Robberson, a former foreign correspondent, said he approached reporting from South Dallas as though he were sending dispatches from overseas. “The vast disparities we found between northern Dallas and southern Dallas made that possible. I treat it as if readers in North Dallas have no idea what’s going on there [in South Dallas]. I explain it the way I would if I was writing about Lebanon.”17

  And what is true for reporters may well chime with their perceived audience. Segregation of any kind is a serious barrier to empathy. “If you’re a reader of the New York Times, then a child who is shot by a stray bullet during a gang shooting is not easy for you to imagine,” Kois told me. “Sandy Hook was easy for people to imagine.”

  This is as true for class as it is for race. Nicole Fitzpatrick, who lost her son Jaiden in Grove City, Ohio, almost nine hours before Samuel’s death, said as much when she explained how his shooting challenged her image of the suburb she had grown up in. “That doesn’t happen here,” she said. “I’m not living in the ’hood.”

  This is less the product of malign neglect than an unconscious omission born from the dead weight of power and privilege that makes the poor and dark in America invisible. In short, there are places in almost every American city where children and teens are expected to get shot—areas where the deaths of young people by gunfire do not contradict a city’s general understanding of how the world should work but rather confirm it. To raise children there, whether they are involved in criminal activity or not, is to incorporate those odds into your daily life.

  Herein lies one of the most tragic elements to emerge from my research: that every black parent of a teenage child I spoke to had factored in the possibility that this might happen to their kid. Indeed, most of them had channeled their parenting skills into trying to stop precisely that from happening. While others are exerting themselves to get their kids into a decent college, through their SATs, or to excel at sports or music, these parents (who love their offspring no less) are devoting their energies to keeping their kids alive long enough that they can transition either out of the neighborhood, out of adolescence, or both. It dictates who they think their children should socialize with, where they can go, and when they have to be home. So when you ask them if they imagined that their sons’ lives could be so abruptly ended in this way, they give a knowing shrug. “You wouldn’t really be doing your job as a parent here if you didn’t think it could happen,” one father in Newark, whose son was shot dead just a couple of hours later, told me.

  Friends of the deceased have similarly accommodated the possibility of death into their teenage lives. When I asked Trey, Stanley Taylor’s friend, if he ever imagined such a thing could happen to Stanley, he paused for a long time. “I ain’t gonna say it,” he said, suddenly choosing his words very carefully. “The life we all chose at one point. We were all going down that wrong path.”

  It had certainly crossed Audry’s mind that she one day might have to bury her son. Only she hadn’t imagined it would be Samuel but her eldest, Jeremy. “Jeremy is the hardhead,” she said. “The knucklehead. He stays in trouble. When you hear about a fight, it may have Jeremy’s name in it. So you have to prepare yourself for Jeremy.” One day that fall, while chatting with Debra after a report about a local shooting, she discussed taking out an insurance policy on her kids for precisely that reason. She said she’d look into it. But she hadn’t got around to it by the time Samuel was killed a month or so later.

  So your existence as a working-class African American makes you vulnerable; your presence in areas where working-class African Americans are most likely to live renders you collateral. “By the numbers,” writes Jesmyn Ward in Men We Reaped: A Memoir, which relates how she lost five young men who were close to her in four years. “By all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.”18

  This reality was not lost on Samuel’s family. “When it’s a black child shot, it’s a flash,” says his father, Willie. “Like a flash of lightning. You see it and you’ll be like, ‘Was that lightning?’ That’s how it is when a black child gets murdered or gets killed. No big news. But when it comes to other races, oh, well, you know it’s going to be on [channels] 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. . . . I hate to say it, but we still live in a racist world. You may have more opportunities. But in the end result you still living in a white world. And we’re still thought of as less than. And basically they’re saying we don’t matter. But if it was their child, they want the world to come to a halt. I’m not speaking out of anger or anything. It’s life.”
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  ON MARCH 12, 1963, a man going by the name of Alek Hidell bought a 6.5mm Carcano Model 91/38 carbine rifle by mail order from Klein’s Sporting Goods Store in Chicago at the coupon-clipping price of $19.95 plus postage and handling. His real name was Lee Harvey Oswald, and almost exactly fifty years prior to Samuel’s murder, he used that rifle to assassinate President John Kennedy in Dallas.

  “Dallas killed Kennedy,” writes Lawrence Wright in In the New World: Growing Up with America from the Sixties to the Eighties. He continues, “We heard it again and again. Dallas as ‘a city of hate, the only city in which the President could have been shot.’ . . . It’s no wonder Dallasites were defensive and angry. And yet behind our anger was the fear that there must be a whisper of truth in the lies people were telling about our city.”19

  Dallas is not a pretty city. A sprawling geographic mass tied together by freeways and highways, it has a downtown but no real center. You can drive around it for days, as I did while interviewing those who knew Samuel, without having a sense of having been anywhere specific beyond the particular destination points to which you were heading.

  When the Dallas Morning News commissioned a poll in 1983, the assassination was one of three dominant images Americans had of the city; the other two were its pro football team, the Dallas Cowboys, and the TV show Dallas.20 Time has eroded the association between the assassination and the city. But to the extent that the rest of the country thinks of it at all, its carefully cultivated reputation as an all-American modern city—shiny skyline, girl-next-door-cheerleaders, business tycoons, oil money, and an impressive string of Super Bowl victories—remains intact.

  The late Texas-based journalist Molly Ivins was characteristically damning in her description of the city’s social geography. “There is a black Dallas, there is a Chicano Dallas, there is a Vietnamese Dallas, there is a gay Dallas, there is even a funky Bohemian Dallas,” she wrote. “But mostly there is North Dallas. A place so materialistic and Republican it makes your teeth hurt to contemplate it. . . . The disgrace of Dallas today is that it is probably the most segregated city this side of Johannesburg.”21