Because he was an Eagle Scout, media loves a white man who gunned down two Black men in Louisiana
25th September 2017 · 0 Comments
We’ve seen this story before: a Black person is murdered by a police officer and the media becomes obsessed with finding out everything and anything about the victim’s background to justify that this person might somehow have been responsible for causing their own death. This is a phenomenon that is not age specific. Whether it’s 12-year-old Tamir Rice, 17-year-old Jordan Davis, 22-year-old Rekia Boyd, or 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones, mainstream media consistently plays into the narrative that Black people are thugs and criminals not deserving of life or humanity.
Conversely, white people, even when (or especially when) they are the perpetrators of crimes, are often portrayed with the utmost dignity and sensitivity. Of course, this isn’t necessarily true when they kill other white people. James Fields, the man who is charged with the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, is described as “misguided,” “disillusioned,” and as “having trouble making friends.”
But what is true is that when white people kill Black people, all sorts of mental gymnastics take place to explain away what they’ve done and paint them as good and decent people. White police officers who kill Black people are afforded the benefit of the doubt and are almost always acquitted because they were just “doing their job.” And white men who randomly kill Black people are portrayed as “clean-cut Americans” (unless of course, those Black people are in Charleston churches).
On Sept.17, 23-year-old Kenneth Gleason was arrested for shooting two Black men in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His first victim was a homeless man. Two nights later, he shot another man who was minding his own business and walking to work. Yet the New York Post covered the story with a story titled: “‘Clean-cut American kid’ suspected of race murders.”
“He looks like any clean-cut American kid,” said neighbor Nancy Reynolds, who didn’t know Gleason or his family. She said it was “hard to believe this sort of thing is still happening.”
And there’s more. The Advocate wrote an entire piece about how shocked Gleason’s friends and family are that he’s been accused of this crime. It starts off like this:
Kenneth Gleason graduated from high school an honor student and became an Eagle Scout in 2012, and, on Tuesday, he was arrested on two counts of first-degree murder — in the apparently random shooting deaths of two black men.
Longtime friends reacted to Gleason’s arrest with shock and disbelief, saying they never suspected their friend could commit such violent acts.
Apparently, we are supposed to be surprised that a white man who was an Eagle Scout could be a murderer. The article goes on to inform the reader that Gleason graduated cum laude from a magnet high school and was a stellar student until he inexplicably dropped out of Louisiana State University.
High school classmates said Gleason studied diligently and treated other people with respect.
Samson Neck, who was friends with him in high school and after, said Gleason “read all kinds of books” and seemed to have “a new book every day, pretty much.”
Police arrested Gleason on Monday on a shoplifting count following reports that he recently stole a copy of The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from a bookstore on Towne Center Boulevard.
It’s supposed to make him sweet and relatable that poor Kenneth was so desperate to feed his reading habit that he stole a book from a bookstore. Except let’s remember that Black people get killed for way less than shoplifting. In fact, we get shot when we aren’t committing crimes at all. Like 15-year-old Jordan Edwards, who was leaving a party that he thought was getting too rowdy when an officer fired into a car full of Black teenagers driving down the road and killed him. But Kenneth Gleason is somehow worthy of our sympathy. Even though he’d already been arrested before, had been in the possession of speeches from Hitler, and despite the fact that police actually found marijuana and other substances in his home (that he admitted to owning), people are still somehow bewildered that Gleason could have randomly murdered two Black people—just because.
On Sept.16, detectives found marijuana and human growth hormones in Gleason’s bedroom and bathroom, according to his arrest report. [Matthew Drago, a former roommate of his] said Gleason smoked marijuana regularly during the time they lived together.
One friend described the family as “great, hardworking people” involved in their community. Gleason’s parents and other family members have declined to comment.
These two articles barely mention the victims. The Advocate doesn’t mention anything about them at all, while the New York Post does briefly mention that Donald Smart, the man who was killed on his way to work, had a family and was beloved. We still don’t know anything about the homeless man. But we know plenty about Kenneth Gleason and how good and righteous he supposedly was.
This kind of racism and bias in reporting is exactly why Americans have such a hard time coming to terms with the fact that white supremacy is indeed a problem in our country in 2017. Apparently, all lives really do matter—so much so that white murderers are treated better in the press than their innocent Black victims. This is one of the most glaring examples of white privilege there is.
– Kelly Macias
This article originally published in the September 25, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
