Standing with the Chapel Hill shooting victims

By Jen Sorensen | February 12, 2015 | 11:09pm

Comics

Many have tried to reduce the shootings in Chapel Hill to a mere “parking dispute,” but one wonders whether the tragedy would have occurred if the three students had instead been, say, three white dudes, and we were not in the midst of a wave of reactionary Islamophobia following the Charlie Hebdo attack.

Worth reading: This Daily Beast piece by Arthur Chu addressing our tendency to give the benefit of the doubt to those from the dominant group and see them as exceptions rather than representatives of a larger demographic. Chu notes that this dynamic finally seems to be changing, as media coverage of the Chapel Hill shootings has raised the possibility of a hate crime.