April Fools’ Day came early at the Washington Post. That was my first thought on reading this thought experiment by Charlotte and Harriet Childress:

Imagine if African American men and boys were committing mass shootings month after month, year after year. Articles and interviews would flood the media, and we’d have political debates demanding that African Americans be “held accountable.” Then, if an atrocity such as the Newtown, Conn., shootings took place and African American male leaders held a news conference to offer solutions, their credibility would be questionable. The public would tell these leaders that they need to focus on problems in their own culture and communities.

But when the criminals and leaders are white men, race and gender become the elephant in the room.

I read this at Ace of Spades HQ, and I had to double-check that Andy hadn’t gotten that wrong, that maybe he pulled it from the Onion, or maybe March was already over with. Imagine if African American men and boys were committing mass shootings month after month, year after year…

It is happening, and the worse it becomes the less they report on it. They know there’s a race elephant somewhere, but they can’t see it. And they want to proclaim their lack of vision as loudly as possible. As Andy points out,

A couple of Newtowns worth of people, almost exclusively African American people, die on the streets of gun control-loving Chicago every month, yet the media flood the authors suggest would happen simply hasn't.

Not only hasn’t the media flood happened, anyone who tries to bring it up in the media is labeled racist. That elephant isn’t the color they think it is. Gun control began as racism and it remains racist today.

No, the public is not “telling these leaders that they need to focus on problems in their own culture and communities”. Certainly, the media isn’t. But that’s not the elephant. The elephant is that the culture of gun control itself isn’t held accountable for its racism at all.

From the comments:

For god’s sake a little girl who sang at Obama’s installment was gunned down just days later and it was media crickets.

It wasn’t media crickets on the reason for the shooting because a gun was used, they would normally have blasted that for weeks. It was media crickets because of who did it and where it happened.

There’s an elephant in the room, and it’s bloody, and the Post refuses to see it.