Only certain black lives matter.
Via FOX News
At the start of every month, the same image of a pistol points from the same place on the front page of the New Pittsburgh Courier, above the same caption: Under Attack By Us!
The only thing that changes is the number of the dead.
“75 of 91 homicides Black lives,” read a recent headline in the renowned black newspaper’s crusade against black-on-black violence. It was accompanied, as always, by a literal body count: The name, race and manner of death for every homicide in Pittsburgh in 2014 — with victims being overwhelmingly black, as the headline shows.
For years across the news media, stories have focused on cases like the killing of Michael Brown, the unarmed black 18-year-old, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. And for years, the Courier has kept asking: What about all these other black lives lost?
That gun on its front page might as well be a finger pointed at black America — from a mirror.
“We are challenging the community to own this problem,” says Rod Doss, editor and publisher of the 107-year-old weekly newspaper, which sometimes does an in-depth story on a particular victim but unfailingly updates and reprints its list, including whether anyone has been arrested.[…]
“Black people will get extremely fired up and fight for a Trayvon Martin (the black teen fatally shot by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida) or any time a white person kills a black person, or police kill a black person. You got rallies and marches and protests, you get your national leaders involved,” says Ulish Carter, the Courier’s managing editor. “But all these situations with blacks killing blacks, you’re just as dead.”
Stephen Broadus, the Courier’s assistant to the publisher, thinks the black community has become resigned to violence.
“Another black kid gone, no big deal. Another black kid in jail, no big deal,” he says, summarizing that view.
“We’ve become numb,” says Ashley Johnson, the Courier reporter who writes the Under Attack stories.
And what makes the Courier feel it can challenge its readers with coverage that is unsparing and painful to read? It’s because of the paper’s record of deep, longstanding support. Since its founding in 1907, perhaps no newspaper has done more to advocate for black people.