While the New York Times has been doing excellent work detailing Donald Trump’s numerous political gaffes and exposing his treasonous ways, their handling of Michael Brown’s death wasn’t as stellar. Brooklyn artist Alexandra Bell is putting them on notice.
As reported by DNAInfo New York, for several months the Crown Heights artist has been plastering posters all over Brooklyn criticizing the racial handling of the story.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BNV93BKh0Hs/
Bell’s beef lays in the headlines of both Brown’s story and the article it ran next to which focused on the Missouri police officer who killed him, Darren Wilson.
Published on August 24, 2014, both stories ran under a headline that read “Two Lives at a Crossroads in Ferguson.”
While Officer Wilson’s story ran with a title that read “A Low-Profile Officer with Unsettled Early Days,” the victim, Michael Brown, had a headline that read “A Teenager Grapling with Problems and Promise.”
As if the headlines weren’t polarizing enough, Wilson’s story described a man who wouldn’t hurt a fly while Brown’s depicted a troubled kid that was referred to as “no angel.”
The implications weren’t lost on Bell who said “I can just say ‘the No Angel story’ and people are like ‘oh man, I remember that, yea.’”
Even though the Public Editor for the Times said the phrase was a “regrettable mistake,” Bell knew that this was just the latest example of how cheap Black lives are viewed not only in the media, but in society in general.
“The Mike Brown article always stuck out to me as an extreme example of false equivalency” while “The Darren Wilson stuck out as more considerate and more forgiving.”
The manner in which this was handled has since inspired Bell to take to the streets of Kings County and put up posters of the polar opposite depictions she calls “counternarratives” and remind everyone of the injustice that minorities are subjected to on a constant basis.
Check out the rest of her story here and let us know if you think Alexandra Bell is going about this the righteous way as opposed to how other attempts in the past.
—
Photo: Instagram/@dansolomito
