A shootout involving rival biker gangs at the Twin Peaks in Waco, Texas May 17 resulted in the deaths of nine people and injured 18. This incident has already been forgotten by most and the media barely even a week after it happened.
With all the racial violence lately, the media has ignored this crime, not focusing on it nearly as long or with as much scrutiny as the riots in Ferguson or Baltimore.
The one of the many differences in these situations is the way the media handled the coverage, and the role race played in this. When the citizens of Ferguson and Baltimore took action against the injustices they believed to have suffered, they were called rioters and judged for tearing apart their towns and wrecking havoc. Yet when these bikers, who were predominantly white, shot up a public place, endangering the public, they were just labeled as rival biker gangs having a dispute.
The media who covered these separate events focus for weeks on the events that occurred in Ferguson and Baltimore. They viewed the protesters as violent and irrational, and yet these men who took the lives of multiple people were forgotten before many even knew all the information regarding the case.
Situations like these and the differences between how they were handled are examples of how different the races are still treated. No matter how many strives forward we think we take as a society, occurrences like these show how far we still have to come as a nation.
