"But he was such a quiet man..."
White people? Gently, lovingly: What the hell?
I once covered an ugly court trial with Ed Mahony, a taciturn journalist’s journalist I admire. During our weeks at the court house, Ed was the soul of professionalism, quick to help when I asked, and at the end of the trial, we went to lunch and became not a single inch closer for the shared experience.
All that to say this is emphatically not about him.
Ed wrote this story about Patrick Edward McCaughey III for Sunday’s Courant, in which he explored the life of the 23-year old man, who is facing — at the least — five years in prison for his role in the Jan. 6th armed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
The Ridgefield, Conn., man can be seen in multiple videos and photos participating in scenes of mayhem, including battering an already-bloodied police officer. In Ed’s story, we find that this is McCaughey’s first arrest.
In Ed’s story, we also find that McCaughey had led an “undistinguished life” — so undistinguished that one of his former football teammates had to be shown a picture of McCaughey to refresh the teammate’s memory that they’d once played together in high school. And then a neighbor recites what has become canon to news stories about white men arrested for heinous crimes: “He was such a quiet man.”
My queendom for a news story that looks at the life of a white suspect and doesn’t include that quote, that he was quiet, that he kept to himself, that he seemed to be a nice guy, that this is all such a shock and surprise.
We do not accord the same attention to suspects of color, and we never have. If you’ve seen this Color of Change study, you know that, instead:
News and opinion media significantly overrepresent the association between Black families and criminality while significantly underrepresenting White families’ association with criminality, distorting the overall picture of crime and those who commit crime.
Then, too, some of us have been squeamish, until recently, about forming public conversations around the words “domestic terrorism” and “white supremacy,” so the armed insurrection has presented us with new opportunities to practice the truth.
Consider this: In segregated Connecticut, when a journalist asks neighbors and friends about a white suspect, those neighbors and friends tend to share ethnicity and race. So you will continue to have a response that reinforces that one of ours would never do something awful, like this. Or that the suspect was misunderstood. Or that the suspect’s childhood was rough. We will bend ourselves into cosmic pretzels to continue the lie that this is behavior not often seen among white people. (Never mind that mass shootings are by far the purview of white men, and maybe it’s time to pay attention.) Meanwhile, dirty cops go free, bad politicians get re-elected, and the truth doesn’t set us free. It remains just over the hill.
Unless we want a Jan. 6 Redux that perhaps will be worse, we can’t keep telling our stories this way. We have a president who at least acknowledges there is such a thing as white supremacy and domestic terrorism. We must do the same. That’s just the first step.
I like to think I surround myself with fairly enlightened people including those folks who are just acquaintances. The fact is that at least half of them lead with ethnicity and/or race descriptors when describing someone I don’t know when that fact has nothing to do with the story. Those times when I’ve asked why the fact the person was black, Puerto Rican, etc. is important to the story have been met with a range of responses. Befuddlement as to why I should ask the question. Embarrassment because the person wasn’t really conscious of how they spoke. The “Well, you know” response based on the assumption that I share the same filter. The angry, “So your calling me a racist/bigot”. The “You’re so PC” shot which I usually take as a compliment.
It’s not like I haven’t been guilty of some of these things but helps to be aware that it’s a lifetime job to be conscious of the biases, assumptions and filters we carry and how they can be triggered by dog whistles and short hand comments. Harder still is challenging yourself and others with questions like the one above but it’s one way to get this stuff out in the open.
"We will bend ourselves into cosmic pretzels to continue the lie that this is behavior not often seen among white people." This is so true. I was raised in CT and the town I grew up in is still 99% white.