On Media Coverage Equity & Tragedies of the Titan & 700 Migrants Dying Off the Shores of Greece
I received an interesting word tonight while with family regarding the tragic events of explorers at sea who died while trying to view remnants of Titanic. I did since read a bit of the commentary by President Obama who I feel summed up the matter succinctly. Perhaps the controversy is not on whether what happened on the Titan was tragic.
Indeed it was and will remain as such. The inhumane factor is the dominance of which this tragic event is receiving coverage in comparison to the oppressed coverage of the recent tragedy of the 700 migrants who lost their lives at sea en route to Greece.
It is probably easier for some Westerners to relate to those who died in the Titan tragedy more than brown people migrating on a boat together in mass because they can see themselves reflected back in those who died in the Titan quite readily.
This sounds crazy, but to illustrate a bit further. I am a proud Korean American but I was raised by White people and had White grandparents. So when I began working at a Korean American agency it didn’t hit me that I was serving older adults I was so deeply intertwined and interconnected with until two things. The first was a client came in and told me I looked like her friend’s daughter. I could feel tears coming to my eyes and did not understand why this made me so emotional until later. I had forgotten a part of me and my community helped call me back to my deeper humanity.
Then was the spike of anti AAPI hate in 2020. It hit me one day abruptly that this could be my own grandparents this violence was afflicting. And I became more deeply impacted and the passion to do my best at this job grew exponentially. Because I could suddenly relate more to those in my community whereas I am ashamed to say before I was disconnected and it felt, well, a bit far away to me.
Therefore I feel treating stories and situations as though we were brother and sister, parent to child, child to elder makes a difference. We are human indeed but becoming more humanized is often something quite different and requires more work of us as beings with souls. To examine situations soulfully, as we were all not just connected, but interconnected. I think this brings us from just caring to caring more fiercely, more together than parallel.
