I'm Noel Weyrich and I think black life is cheap

I agree with Noel Weyrich, fuck that dead nigger bitch

You know, there are some white hipsters, young, snarky, who think they can be "contrarians" and say what they want. I don't think that's the case. Especially when it comes to race, a subject they don't understand. They think if they listen to rap and have some blues, and a Bob Marley poster, everything is cool.

It isn't.

Attytood, via Atrios, picked up on this:

A few days after very minor local stories about the Figueroa case, Cranium (real name: Richard Blair) wrote a blistering assault on the disparity between the coverage of a missing young white women and a missing young woman of color. His piece became a cause celebre in the blogosphere and led to massive publicity about the case, both locally and in the national media. On Aug. 20, police found Figueroa's body in a remote area of Chester, Pa., and charged her ex-boyfriend Stephen Poaches, with the murder.

The story didn't end the way that her friends and family had hoped, but the grim discovery and the arrest of Poaches did bring some closure. And the work of Cranium and the rest of the blogosphere in raising the profile of the case was widely praised -- until "contrarian" Weyrich stepped up to the plate. His take?

But you don't have to look very far to see that the Figueroa case proves nothing about racial bias in cable crime coverage. What it does prove is that bloggers are a gang of dimwits happy to taunt a big dopey dog called cable news. And this time the dimwits found the dopey dog's tickle spot.

You can read it yourself, but to sum it up: Weyrich thinks there's no racism in cable news since there must be lots of missing white women who don't have a compelling story line also don't get covered. But bloggers don't need to check out their facts like the mainstream media, and so the real problem is guilty TV producers who allowed themselves to be browbeaten into covering Figueroa by ignorant bloggers. Here's his money graph, comparing this case to the murder of Laci Peterson:

Laci's story was Hollywood. LaToyia's story—unmarried, scratching out a living, knocked up by some lowlife probationer—isn't. Push the hot button of race, however, and it's very easy to make an oversimplified case that the media puts a higher value on missing white women. Essence magazine ran a story listing eight black women whose sudden disappearances failed to create Aruba-style media circuses. But I suspect there are a good number of disappeared white women who haven't had their relatives interviewed by Greta Van Susteren either, since the FBI currently has files on 29,000 missing people of all races who have disappeared under suspicious circumstances, and homicide is a leading cause of death among pregnant women. Media coverage of the missing and murdered isn't about fairness or responsible news standards—it's about myths and fables, the perfect husband with a secret, the dark side of an island paradise, the evil that lurks within. To quote that Don King movie, “It's entertainment, baby.”

Actually, when you read the whole piece, you get the sense that the main reason Weyrich wrote it was because of the pleasure he takes from using the phase "Dick Brain" (His translation of "Richard Cranium," although Cranium himself notes it should be "Dick Head") -- a phase that he manages to use some eight times with immense self glee. Our son would have found it funny...last year. He's in 5th grade now.

Also..."I suspect there are a number of missing white women..." I thought it was bloggers who are too lazy to check things out, Noel.

But as far as his "substantive" arguments go, two things strike us as very, very wrong.

First, he claimed that all the attention "didn't help solve LaToyia's murder. But it felt good to the bloggers because the blogosphere is a great big cyberspace circle-jerk."

Well, within a couple of days after the blogosphere cranked up, police dramatically stepped up their probe, bringing in homicide detectives and searching for her with helicopters and cadaver dogs. They searched Poaches' Philadelphia home, his Ford Tempo, and the house of the mother of his first child. Police also visited several oil yards of his employer, F.C Haab Oil Co. More importantly, a reward offered by the Citizens Crime Commission soared to $100,000 because of the publicity -- and it was that reward that prompted a tipster -- a friend of alleged killer Poaches -- to call the cops and led to the sting operation in Chester that solved the case. Would any of this happened without blogger action? We don't think so.

Secondly, and arguably worse, is that in trying to dismiss the racial aspects of the case, Weyrich strikes us as...well, a tad racist. We were especially troubled by his portrayal of Figueroa as "unmarried, scratching out a living, knocked up by some lowlife probationer." That broad-brushed, dismissive spin is technically true.

You can use this form to ask the editors of Philadephia Magazine why they think black life is cheap.

Also, if you live in the Philly area, you might want to call your local black radio station and have them ask the same thing.

I don't find it a tad anything. I'll say it outright. Noel Weyrich is a racist who thinks black life is cheap. He may not think he's a racist, but few people do.

He would have never described a white victim in such a way, never in his life. He can cheapen Figeroa's life precisely because he attaches no value to it. She's just another dead nigger. The fact that she had a family who loved her, who cared about her is irrelevant. He just has to get in some digs on bloggers.

Only problem for him is that his bosses will probably have to answer for his racist rant. Because, while he may not like blogs much, they do generate stories, and a racist column is a great story.

Black people don't begrudge the Holloway family for caring that they find Natalee. So why should Weyrich begrudge bloggers for caring that there was a missing black woman who got no attention. Unless, of course, you think black life is cheap.

posted by Steve @ 1:36:00 AM