The Racialized, Disparate Response of Ralph Yarl and Kaylin Gillis' Shootings: Bobby Burack
The stories of Kaylin Gillis and Ralph Yarl are quite similar.
Last Saturday, a 65-year-old man shot and killed Gillis, 20, after she and three others accidentally turned into the wrong driveway in New York.
Last Thursday, an 84-year-old man shot Ralph Yarl, 16, after mistakenly ringing the wrong doorbell in Kansas City.
Both victims found themselves at the wrong place, at the wrong time in the presence of an old timer with a gun. The difference is that Yarl survived.
Yet it's his shooting that has received the bulk of the attention, nearly all of the outrage.
President Joe Biden is crestfallen over Yarl's shooting. Biden invited the kid to the White House.
Vice President in name Kamala Harris voiced her outrage over his shooting:
"Let’s be clear: No child should ever live in fear of being shot for ringing the wrong doorbell," tweeted Harris. "Every child deserves to be safe. That’s the America we are fighting for.”
Ralph Yarl and Kaylin Gillis.
Meanwhile, the president and VP have not commented on Gillis's death. Her family has not received their calls.
In television, CNN and MSNBC have focused segments of programming on Yarl. Yet mentions of Gillis are rare, only visible when chastizing the GOP over gun laws.
How can that be? How can two shootings of such similarity receive such a disparate response?
Quite simply because Yarl is black and Gillis was white. Thereby only the former's shooting has the means to become an advantageous political matter.
USA Today, one of the oldest institutions in news media, confirmed as much onf Tuesday. The outlet posted a tweet discussing the two recent shootings, side-by-side. Without shame, the tweet named the races of Yarl and his shooter, but not Gillis and hers.
The post reads:
Paragraph 1: An 84-year-old white man was charged after shooting Ralph Yarl, 16, a Black teen who family members said went to the wrong house.
Paragraph 2: Two days after he was shot, Kaylin Gillis, 20, was shot by a homeowner while in a car that turned into the wrong driveway.
More fun it'd be if the press didn't make it so obvious.
The skin colors of all lives don't matter. Only the skin colors of black victims do. At least according to the media, the anti-racists, and Biden/Harris.
Notably, the racialization of Yarl's shooting is void evidence to this point. There's no proof the white man shot him because of his black skin color.
A white person shooting a black person is not inherently racist, no more than a black person shooting a white person (a matter that never makes the news).
Tragic, sure. Racist, no.
There was a time only tragedies that were racist were called racist. Unfortunately, that time is no more.
Society doesn't rely on proof before declaring a story racist.
Consider that cities permitted BLM to burn buildings in 2020 in the name of a racial reckoning, a byproduct of the hypothesis that George Floyd's death was an act of racism.
Three years later, there's still no evidence Derek Chauvin killed Floyd on account of his race. Don't take our word for it; take the prosecutions'.
Notice that the skin colors of Floyd and Chauvin were never topics in the courtroom. See, the prosecution could not corroborate that the killing was rooted in racism.
Nor could the influencers who encouraged "protests" in honor of a racial injustice.
Ultimately, the racialization of George Floyd's death was a political talking point. As was Tyre Nichols', even though five black officers killed him.
Black officers killing a black man is also whitey's fault, we learned early this year.
The response to the shooting of Ralph Yarl follows the same playbook: inflame racial animosity at all costs. Facts be damned.
Current supplies of racism cannot fufill their ever-expanding demands. There's too great of an incentive in racial division to let it form naturally.
The cases of Floyd, Nichols, and Yarl are not proof of white supremacy. As per our recent column, their cases are instead proof of a need to inflame the fear of white supremacy.
Kaylin Gillis' life matters too. Even if her life isn't as useful as Yarl's in the quest to further incite racial hatred in America.