As a person highly critical of the media, the title of this article intrigued me, but at the very first line I was already painfully aware that this was not an article that would sit well with me. “I used to feel sick [watching videos of police brutalizing minorities].” But not now? Ooo-kay.
As much as Nicholson thinks she may be promoting critical thought and encouraging people to think for themselves when faced with media coverage of controversial issues like Spring Valley, she is obviously unaware that, historically, media has always been skewing issues very heavily in favor of the nice white people who are just trying to do their jobs. Situations like this have been going on for years, and the only reason that recently it may seem popular to be hating on white figures of authority is because social media allows for non-white witnesses to instantly get their testimonies directly to the public, along with hard evidence like pictures or videos to back up their accounts. A black teen gets murdered by a cop and the media puts out pictures of him smoking or flashing gang signs, digs up stories about anything vaguely criminal related to him and his family, and the case is dismissed as just another criminal stopped by the police. (Contrarily, when a white kid shoots up a cinema or a church, we hear about how the poor child was a misunderstood loner and see pictures of this angel posing with his mom on graduation day.)
If it weren’t for the people unrelated to media posting their own accounts of events on the internet, this is all we would hear of the issue and it would be forgotten in a month; but thanks to independent sources we do, in fact, know more about the circumstances, like those of the Spring Valley incident. Actually, we probably wouldn’t have heard about it at all otherwise. Students in the class at the moment of the altercation have communicated via social media about how this girl, quiet, new to the class, refused to get off her phone after the teacher and an administrator asked her to. Even if she had been a notoriously troublesome student, unless she was threatening serious harm to someone there is no excuse for a grown man to wrench her from her desk and throw her across the classroom, especially a grown man trained to “serve and protect” and entrusted with the responsibility of these students’ safety. I’m sure Fields was an inspiration to Nicholson’s little sister, but a lovely anecdote about this white cop from another white person doesn’t do much convincing when you consider the numerous complaints filed against Fields over the years from POC students’ and their families. Of course, those complaints could have easily been missed by Nicholson, as, you know, they weren’t reported on by the media until social websites brought Fields’ actions into question.
And one last thing: “Think about how the victim was raised?” Yeah, my critical thinking skills are gonna be kicking in for sure when I read an article insinuating that the upbringing of a black kid would be an excuse for a white cop to body slam her. This is why I don’t let sub-par white media like this think for me.
Katherine Snow
Junior, Industrial Design
