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Don’t be so quick to blame the murder victim

By EUGENE ROBINSON

November 30, 2007

WASHINGTON — Why do you suppose so many people were so quick to blame Sean Taylor for his own murder?

Relax, that’s a rhetorical question. There’s no need for self-exculpatory huffing and puffing, no need to point out that the verdict of suicide-by-bad-attitude — pronounced so often this week, and so coldly — was usually couched in broad hints or softened by the nebulous fog of the conditional mood. Everyone knew what was really being said, and everyone knew why.

Taylor instantly became not a person but a character, one whose purpose was to advance a narrative about young black men and their manifold failings. Taylor, a gifted defensive back for the Washington Redskins, had been in trouble with the law. Despite the millions he earned playing football, he never managed to escape the quicksand lure of the mean streets — parasitic friends, envious haters, a culture of casual violence. It was his decision to swim in this cesspool of dysfunction, the narrative said. And, like so many other young black men who have made the same wrong choice, he paid for it with his life.

At least that was the story before Wednesday, when Robert Parker, director of the Miami-Dade police, announced that investigators had “no reason” to believe Taylor was targeted by his killer or even knew the man who shot him. Police were operating on the theory that the crime was a botched attempt at burglary, Parker said, essentially a random act.

I realize that Parker may eventually be proved wrong. But what fascinates me is how eager people were to believe the worst about Taylor — how ready to stuff a young man’s death into a box labeled “pathology” and call it a day — in the absence of supporting factual evidence. Apparently, “innocent until proved guilty” doesn’t apply to young black men even when they’re the victims of violent crime.

The few facts we have, in fact, tell a story that’s very different from the chosen narrative. Sean Taylor is hardly a typical product of those fabled “mean streets” — he grew up with his father, a suburban police chief, in a middle-class neighborhood. He did spend weekends with his mother in a tougher area, though, and acquired some sketchy friends. But at the same time he was attending an exclusive private high school, where he met his girlfriend Jackie Garcia, a niece of the actor Andy Garcia.

Taylor’s home, with its expansive yard and its big swimming pool, is in an upper-middle-class suburb. There’s nothing remotely “mean” about the street.

Jackie Garcia hid under the covers with the couple’s 18-month-old daughter early Monday while Taylor faced the intruder who shot and mortally wounded him. Andy Garcia released a statement Wednesday praising Taylor for his “heroic” sacrifice that saved Jackie’s life.

Much has been made of the fact that Taylor grabbed a machete from under his bed before confronting the intruder. In New York or St. Louis or Seattle, if you saw a machete you’d think: deadly weapon. But I spent years covering Latin America for The Washington Post, so when I see a machete in a place like Miami I’m more likely to think: garden implement. Tropical vegetation is a lot easier to trim with a machete than with hedge clippers, and Taylor’s father said Sean used the blade in his yard. No, machetes are not usually kept under the bed. But if my house had been broken into recently — as Taylor’s was, barely a week before his slaying — I might have wanted the thing a little closer to hand.

My purpose here isn’t to make a hero out of Sean Taylor, though he may well have died a hero’s death. He made some serious mistakes in his life, and he didn’t always have the proper regard for authority and discipline. Nor am I trying to sell the “he was finally turning his life around” narrative, as if taking a few GPS readings were enough to show anyone the way to responsible manhood.

Life isn’t so linear — and people aren’t so one-dimensional.

The next time you encounter a young black man like Sean Taylor — a man who can be headstrong and rebellious, who listens to rap music and sometimes wears his hair in a wild-man ’fro that’s meant to intimidate, who scowls when we want him to smile and makes a bad mistake or two and doesn’t choose the friends we would want him to choose — know that there is possibility within him, and contradiction, and the capacity for love. Know that he’s more than a plot device.

Fios wrote:No need to thank me folks, thank the man who wrote it

Irn-Bru wrote:

Fios wrote:No need to thank me folks, thank the man who wrote it

You see, 1niksder, it's like I told you: behind every seeming "accomplishment" of a cup is a human who did all the hard work. Sheesh.

jazzskins wrote:I read that article this morning, and sent him an e-mail congratulating him on a well written and though out article.

JansenFan wrote:It's at the bottom of the article.

I believe it's eugenerobinson@washpost.com. Of course you'll notice, it wasn't posted at washingtonpost.com, since the two main culprits both write there.

Media has failed with Taylor coverage

By DAN LE BATARD
dlebatard@MiamiHerald.com

I'm proud of this ridiculous thing I do for a living. It makes me happy. It is a lot of arrested-development fun. And it gives me the kind of power and platform I don't really deserve.

But there are times when being a journalist in today's climate embarrasses me. Makes me feel dirty and ashamed. I've always wondered why the reporters in the movies are so often portrayed as greasy, sneaky profiteers chasing the hero.

And then Sean Taylor dies in a terrible way, and it reminds me.

Journalism isn't very human sometimes. It isn't very compassionate or empathetic, either. Objectivity, the alleged bedrock of this profession, is both the excuse we hide under and a lie.
There are slants and shades in everything you read, hear and see as the line between Chris Wallace and Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly and Katie Couric and Geraldo Rivera becomes blurred and smeared as entertainaournalism. Asking emotional humans, with all their embedded prejudices and experiences and baggage, to be without bias (conscious or subconscious) is like asking night not to be dark. All we can do is aspire to clinical objectivity as professionals and hope that too many people don't get trampled and harmed when we inevitably fail.

CRUEL AND UNFAIR

And we've done some failing on this Taylor story. What happened to him and his family is cruel and unfair. That's it. It isn't endemic of a people or a region or a school. It is just unspeakably cruel and unspeakably unfair. I don't know how anyone could lack so much compassion that they would somehow blame a city or school or culture to this awfulness, as if a city or school or culture could possibly deserve something that brings this kind of sobbing and wailing.

And yet that's what Time Magazine and MSNBC and FOX and CNN and ESPN have wanted to discuss in recent days because the machine must stay fed, and it matters less and less what kind of garbage we throw into its insatiable maw and try to pass off as nutrition. Why does this keep happening in Miami -- the city and the university? What's going on down there? As if Taylor somehow brought this grief upon himself, as if South Florida brought it upon itself. The late Darrent Williams, killed in a drive-by at 24, isn't representative of Oklahoma State's thug culture. But Taylor, killed in his home at 24, is representative of the University of Miami's?

TOO MUCH GOSSIP

I can't imagine how terrible it must be for Taylor's broken family to watch the television and see their late son/brother/boyfriend turned into a talk topic and one-dimensional stick figure because we, the media, didn't and couldn't have a complete picture of their beloved and didn't have the time to wait for one to develop. We didn't have very much information immediately after Taylor's death, but we had too much time to fill without new information, so too much of Taylor's televised eulogy became noise and speculation and gossip-cloaked-in-journalism about his troubled past.

A DUI and a gun-waving incident aren't irrelevant, but they weren't all Taylor was, either. Brett Favre, rest assured, won't be eulogized with excessive emphasis on his pain-killer addiction, especially not if he were to die this horrifically. How do you think your grieving family would like to see you defined on television by your one or two worst public moments?

God bless him, Taylor's brave and tranquil father, suffering the worst pain a human can, has been as strong as anyone I've ever seen in front of TV cameras.

There would be plenty of people applauding, and no one blaming him, if he lashed out angrily at all the people trying to do their job on his lawn.

I just wish sometimes that my profession had more of his grace.

Snout wrote:This article is way off the mark. Nobody "blamed Sean for his own murder." People merely asked the question "Was this preventable?

Snout wrote:Or was it just a random act of violence?"

Snout wrote:For a fact, Sean's house was burglarized a week before, and his closest friends on the team didn't even know about it. Does that sound strange to anyone?

Snout wrote:For a fact, other NFL players who are familiar with the neighborhood have said that it was dangerous, and believe that Sean put himself at risk by staying there. The author tries to paint the neighborhood with white picket fences, but that just aint the truth.

Chris Luva Luva wrote:

Snout wrote:For a fact, other NFL players who are familiar with the neighborhood have said that it was dangerous, and believe that Sean put himself at risk by staying there. The author tries to paint the neighborhood with white picket fences, but that just aint the truth.

Thats 100% incorrect. The community is it's own city... I don't know too many hoods here in Baltimore that are rich enough to petition to become it's own city. Mine surely isn't.

LOSTHOG wrote:I'm with you Chris. All I heard was the streets of Miami had people who hated him. Big difference from where his house was. I grew up in Anacostia, but I bet our crime numbers are quite different from Georgetown even though it's all considered DC.