I return with the necessary Dara Horn excerpts:
“The delayed clarity on what exactly happened in Jersey City [2019 shooting] muted some of the public empathy that instantly followed the previous attacks. So did the identities of the attackers, both of whom were Black, and their targets, who were Hasidic Jews who, it has progressively become clear, many otherwise enlightened Americans view as absolutely fair game for bigotry.
This was obvious from reporting within hours of the attack, which gave surprising emphasis to the murdered Jews as “gentrifying” a “minority” neighborhood. This was remarkable, given that the tiny Hasidic community in question, highly visible members of the world’s most consistently persecuted minority, in fact came to Jersey City fleeing gentrification, after being priced out of long-established Hasidic communities in Brooklyn. More tellingly, as the journalist Armin Rosen has pointed out, the apparently murderous rage against gentrification has yet to result in anyone using automatic weapons to blow away white hipsters at the newest Blue Bottle Coffee franchise. What was most remarkable about this angle, however, was how it was presented in media reports as providing “context.”
The “context” supplied by news outlets after this attack was breathtaking in its cruelty. As the Associated Press explained in a news report about the Jersey City murders that was picked up by NBC and many other outlets, “The slayings happened in a neighborhood where Hasidic families had recently been relocating, amid pushback from some local officials who complained about representatives of the community going door to door, offering to buy homes at Brooklyn prices.”
…New Jersey’s state newspaper, the Star-Ledger, helpfully pointed out that “the attack that killed two Orthodox Jews, an Ecuadorian immigrant and a Jersey City police detective has highlighted racial tension that had been simmering ever since ultra-Orthodox Jews began moving to a lower-income community"—even though the assailants never lived in Jersey City, and apparently chose their target simply through internet searches for Jewish institutions in the New York area. The Washington Post began its analysis of the murders by announcing that Jersey City "is grappling with whether the attack reflects underlying ethnic tensions locally and fears that it could spark new ones” even though the rest of the article described in detail how “longtime black residents and ultra-Orthodox implants alike say that they haven’t experienced significant ethnic tensions here.” Nonetheless, readers were informed, “the influx of Hasidic residents comes as many of the longtime black residents feel increasingly squeezed.” This was all about gentrification, the public learned. The assailants, who wore socially acceptable clothing, were expressing an understandable communal sentiment. The newly dead Jews, on the other hand, were members of the unharassed majority, despite being the country’s top hate-crime target according to the FBI. They were also rich, despite experiencing the same poverty rate as the rest of New York and New Jersey. On top of that, they wore unfashionable hats. So it kind of made sense that people wanted to murder their children with high impact explosives.
I was not able to find any similar “context” in media reports after the 2015 massacre at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, or the 2016 massacre at an LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando, Florida, or the 2019 massacre at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas frequented by Latino shoppers—all hate-crime attacks that unambiguously targeted minority groups. In each of those cases, as was true in Jersey City, media coverage included sympathetic pieces about the victims, along with investigative pieces about the perpetrators, the latter focused on how perpetrators were drawn into violent irrational hatred… No one covered [the] “context,” because doing that would be bonkers. It would be hateful victim-blaming, the equivalent of analyzing the flattering selfies of a rape victim in lurid detail in order to provide “context” for a sexual assault.”
— Pages 211-213
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