Discovering the Race Narrative

Growing up, I never really paid much attention to politics or the media. The greatest extent of my knowledge was that FOX was conservative and MSNBC was liberal. In the last few years, I've heard the opinion that the liberal news sources will try to promote the narrative that racism is a really big problem in America. This can be seen with the shooting of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. The media blew up these stories, misrepresented facts, and outright lied to promote the narrative that white cops are racist and just want to shoot black people.

Do white cops shoot black people? Absolutely.

Do black cops shoot white people? Yes. Yes they do. But when was the last time you heard a story about a white man being shot by a black cop on television? I don't remember ever hearing such a story. In order to find the story, I had to do a google search for black cop shoots white man.

There I found the story of Dillon Taylor. The first story I pulled up came from the Mr Conservative blog. In August of 2014, Dillon Taylor was shot in a convenience store for refusing to stop when police arrived. Dillon was unarmed and had headphones on. Police were responding to reports of someone waving a gun around. I don't know all the details, but it looked like Dillon may have looked like he was reaching for a gun while pulling up his pants.

After looking at multiple news sources, I found no evidence or Dillon getting aggressive with the cops. Dillon didn't try to fight the cops or steal the cop's gun to start shooting them.

I never heard about this story until doing a google search for it. I don't know if it made it on televised news. Maybe it was televised only in a local area. A quick google search of Dillon Taylor will bring up the Huffington Post. The article does not mention the race of the cop that shot and killed Dillon.

As far as I know, there were no riots that were caused by Dillon's death. Protests did not happen on a nation wide basis. No one burned down any buildings or smashed squad cars. And I am glad that none of this happened. Stealing Doritios and toilet paper won't fix things.

I'm not saying that Dillon's death was justified. I don't think a cop's job is easy. In this post, I am not aiming to criticize the police, the victims, or the protesters. I am only criticizing the media's narrative and the public reaction to the narrative.

In the next several years, this narrative will continue. There will be more stories of black men getting shot by white cops. There will be more riots. More cities will burn themselves down. More people will protest. I'll catch glimpses of the headlines, and realize that it is all just statistics.