I must be rather naive. I received a comment that advised me that the story I related in my last story failed to relate that the participants were all black. To be up front, none of the stories I read or heard on the attack mentioned race. I looked again tonight at some of the stories, and none mentioned race. Is the absence of this fact important.

As my advisor thinks, race will become important in the defense of the group of people that attacked the girl and her father. Somehow, the race of the attackers will be used to mitigate the horrific aspects of the attack, or at least, the defense will attempt to use race for that purpose. So, why isn't it mentioned in any of the news stories?

And, again, as I blogged earlier, why is the "victim" identified as the father with little notice of the girl that was, at minimum, groped in public? Four different media reported the story, and not one mentioned race, and all emphasized the father's actions and injuries without acknowledging any kind of recognized harm to the girl. The reader of the four stories by four different reporters and advancing through at least four different editors would think that there would be four different perspectives. Yet, all reported the same actions in the same manner with the same elements being emphasized.

I think this is educated gatekeeping. I think it is popular in new media these days to emphasize crime, generally, in neighborhoods. It is not popular to acknowledge race or females as victims. If it had been a white, straight 12-year old that had been "groped," for wont of a better word, and the mother had attempted to defend her child, then the story would probably have exploded that a mother was injured in the defense of her son, who will forever be traumatized by such an event. It's not unusual for mothers to defend their sons, and it's not even unusual for a mother to defend a guilty child. But if this had been a mother defending her daughter, resulting in two female victims at the hand of a group of young men, then we would never have heard about it--as long as the mother lived. But, because an adult male was injured by a mob of teenaged males, THAT made the news. Race would have been mentioned, I'm sure, if it had been a black man attacked by a group of white males.

I think our media have been educated to emphasize only sensational news and not report the kind of news that lets us know what is happening every day, and for some reason, we're all surprised when the next time a similar event happens to ourselves. When will the next man be beat up for taking care of his daughter? And will it make news? Probably not....