THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

This is a question that the family and friends of publicized black shooting victims often ask when they see the person they know shown as someone entirely and negatively different in news reports. This has come to a head with the murder of Michael Brown by a Ferguson, MO policeman. And blacks are now taking to Twitter in an angry rebuke of this white media habit.

When Tyler Atkins heard about the shooting of Michael Brown, 18, an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., he posted on Twitter a picture of himself in a tuxedo, with a saxophone around his neck, next to a photograph of himself dressed in a black T-shirt with a blue bandanna tied around his head and his finger pointed at the camera.

Like hundreds of young African-Americans, he placed his pictures under the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, protesting Mr. Brown’s killing by a police officer and the way young black men are depicted in the news media. He said Mr. Brown’s identity was distorted and filtered through negative stereotypes, and that the same would have been done to him with the bandanna image if he found himself the victim of a similar tragedy. The first picture was taken after a jazz concert at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, Tex., where Mr. Atkins, a senior, studies music. The other was taken during a recording for a rap video he made with friends for a school math project.

“Had the media gained a hold of this picture, I feel I it would be used to portray that I was in a gang, which is not true at all,” Mr. Atkins, 17, wrote in an email.

The speed with which the shooting of Mr. Brown has resonated on social media has helped propel and transform a local shooting into a national cause, as African-American commenters draw attention to continued incidents of blacks being shot by police and the media portrayals of young black men.

“This affects me deeply because the stories of Mike Brown, Renisha McBride, Trayvon Martin, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo and many more could have been me,” Mr. Atkins wrote, referring to the shooting deaths of blacks, some at the hands of police.

When cops, or anybody else for that matter,shoot someone for being black they do need to make it look like they had a real reason. And imitation thuggery is a great way to scare the shit out of Fux Nooz viewers and many others as well. Scared people will believe any sort of crap you feed them. Voila, problem solved.