Why the Wisconsin Sikh Temple Shooting Should Make Us All Afraid
BY RAJA KRISHNA
On Friday, July 20th, 2012, a man named James Eagen Holmes walked into a Colorado movie theater and opened fire on a crowd of confused and terrified moviegoers. Seventeen days later, on Sunday, August 5th, 2012, a man named Wade Michael Page walked into a Wisconsin gurdwara—a Sikh place of worship—and opened fire on scores of unsuspecting and innocent Sikh worshippers.
After both tragedies, the White House released very similar statements from President Obama. Not only did they strike the same melancholy “mourner-in-chief” chord, but they were also comparable in length and rhetoric. However, in Colorado, both presidential candidates chose to suspend their campaigns for several days after the shooting, whereas in Wisconsin, they did not go as far, opting instead to pull down attack ads airing in the state. The media pickup on the president’s Aurora statement was exponentially higher, leading to the campaigns’ respective decisions in each state. The logical follow-up question, then, is this: why did the news media react so differently to the two shootings?
Of course, there are several reasons that could explain why the gurdwara shooting didn’t stay in the news cycle longer, but the most disturbing one sounds innocuous: the Colorado shooting was just plain more interesting. After all, the sickening “logic” behind the Wisconsin shooting is easy to discern. It was a clear-cut hate crime, spurred by misinformation and rampant stereotyping of the Sikh community. By contrast, the shooting in Colorado was raw and bone-chilling. The fact that a single man was able to stroll into a movie theater an open fire makes us all feel fearful.
It is that last part, the part about the Colorado shooting making us all afraid, that makes me afraid. As I watched coverage of the Wisconsin shootings, evidence for this explanation began to amass. On all three major news outlets—CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News—the major anchors invited representatives from organizations like the Sikh Coalition to their programs to discuss their religions. Of course, it was laudable to give Sikhs the chance to speak to millions of American viewers about their religion and culture. Unfortunately, the networks also succeeded in marginalizing their very guests with such a powerful national stage. For example, CNN chose to seat a Sikh spokesperson on one end of an oblong table, with a host of four or five other reporters and anchors seated at the other end, each asking innocent questions about the Sikh religion. The visual separation of the CNN reporters from the Sikh individual was enough to automatically evoke an “us-and-them” or “you people” dynamic in the interview setting, but the host of the show went even farther when she told the Sikh man that she was “deeply sorry for your loss,” as if the Sikh community was the only one damaged by the shooting. *
Think about that. The Aurora tragedy was framed as a national one, a unifying point for all Americans to mourn, and to remember to put aside our differences. Just weeks later, the Wisconsin tragedy was framed as the victimization of a small sliver of a population of individuals who are living among us, but aren’t quite us—a reminder of the very differences Aurora coverage asked us to reconsider. Many of the same people who argue that the Colorado shooting was preventable through increased regulation and background checks simply accept hate crimes as part of a society as large as ours. Instead, we need to recognize that the way we talk about groups can influence the way we think about them.
It’s very easy to understand that a white supremacist targeted the Sikhs because of their differences, but saying that the slaughter of Sikhs is wrong is only the first step. If we don’t begin to recognize tragedies like this as American problems, we risk marginalizing our diversity instead of welcoming it. We risk losing the values upon which our country prides itself. To me, that’s just as scary as anything Wade Michael Page could have ever dreamed of doing.
*To be fair, CNN published a fantastic opinion piece on its website called “Today, we are all American Sikhs.” Nevertheless, CNN’s and other networks’ television coverage of the shooting overshadowed the important message in the opinion piece.