*Warning: This article contains disturbing images.
On December 26, 2005, 15-year-old Jane Creba was fatally gunned down in downtown Toronto, near the Eaton Center. She had been caught in a gang-related gunfight and was pronounced dead at St. Michael’s hospital later that night. In November 2006, Jeremiah Valentine was arrested and charged as one of her murderers, pleading guilty.
The Creba slaying brought immense media coverage, several months of invasive investigation, wire-tapping, and investigation of more than 50 people. Her death in 2005 led to the naming of that period of time as Toronto’s “Summer of the Gun.” However, the number of gun-related homicides reached a record 52 murders in total that year. Where was the media coverage of those gun-related homicides? Why the police did not work on figuring out those homicides? The death of Jane Creba prompted Toronto police to change their ways of investigating public shootings. And Jane Creba was white.
To explain it in a better way, we shall take a look at the 2007 fatal shooting of a 15-year-old high school student Jordan Manners. On May 23, 2007, Manners, a young Black boy, was gunned down in his high school, CW Jeffreys Collegiate Institute. The school was on immediate lockdown for hours, and Manners reportedly passed away later that evening in the hospital. The investigation that followed was, to put it lightly, a prime example of what not to do when investigating a possible homicide. His mother, Lorraine Small, was notified by a family friend via cellphone. When she arrived at the school, no one could tell her which hospital he was taken to. When she got the address and was driven there, she and her family waited in a boardroom until he was pronounced dead.
The media showed the mother collapsing in pain and anguish upon receiving the unfortunate news. Mrs. Small later stated that the police never once talked to or interviewed her about her son. Lorraine never got any of her questions answered. The police reports never offered an explanation for their slow response time to resuscitate Jordan. During the lockdown, policemen were giving mixed messages about where the shooter might be and where the investigation was going. The entire ordeal ended up in many raids across Toronto, Canada’s Jane and Finch community, with two youths being charged and tried for Manners’ murder, and being ultimately acquitted. The news coverage was big, due to it being the first murder in a Canadian high school, and had to crack down on gun violence, but most of the coverage came from the Jane and Finch community, outraged at the botching of the investigation and the biases, many people had in believing that Manners was involved with some gang or brought up his reputation as a student.
Neither Jane Creba’s investigation nor her family ever received this kind of negative attention after her murder. Most of the city fought for better police forces, more safety measures, and cracking down more on gang activity and gun violence. Despite making up an alarming rate of gun violence statistics, not much is done when it comes to solving their homicides. However, police competency in homicide investigation only improved when this bubbly, upbeat 15-year-old white student had her life tragically cut short.
This is what is called the “white filter.”
What Is The White Filter?
The white filter can be described as a phenomenon in which an issue does not receive the appropriate amount of attention or offered any practical solutions until white people are affected by it. While there is not a fixed term for it, there are many examples in the news and media. The Jordan Manners story is a set example of how it is a problem in Toronto, but truth be told, it happens everywhere in the world. Look at the news stories about missing or kidnapped people. How many are white? Which true crime cases are famous in which the perpetrators (and mostly, victims) are white? These stories gain more attention and notoriety because the people involved are white. Black cases – aside from the token black OJ Simpson case – are ignored. The fact is Western society does not seem to be ready to help minorities with problems in their community until the problems seep into mainstream society. Below are three more historical examples in which the white filter has been applied.
The AIDS Crisis and Ryan White
In June of 1981, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention first received reports of clusters of a disease that was not found in normal functioning immune systems. This disease was found mostly in young, healthy gay men, and the virus was believed to be transmitted via sexual contact or exposure to infected blood or blood products (needles, syringes, organ transplants, etc.) This new disease was deemed Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome, also known as AIDS.
Not much was initially done for AIDS during that time, seeing as though it was a disease amongst gay men, which was offensively nicknamed “gay cancer”. AIDS was believed to have originated from a mixture of monkey blood and human DNA somewhere in Central Africa. Many Americans wanted to ostracize people with AIDS and targeted the LGBTQ+, Black people (since AIDS originated in Africa), Heroin and other drug users, and other relevant groups of people. AIDS became such a horrid stigma amongst these socially-affected groups that many of them tried to fight for better policies and treatments for AIDS. Some of the most iconic practices is the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus‘s famous “black and white” photo, where each man in the chorus wearing black represented a member they had lost to AIDS. Another one would be Princess Diana’s iconic image of holding an AIDS patient’s hand without gloves since the belief back then was that you could transmit it by holding hands. Possibly the most damning one was the photo of David Kirby, a young man dying of AIDS with his family at his bedside. His photo was deemed “the face of AIDS” and showed people how devastating the disease was, and more awareness needed to be made about it, humanizing those who suffered from it. However, as impactful as these events were, none of them made as much change as that of Ryan White.
Ryan White was a 13-year-old hemophiliac boy from Indiana who became infected with AIDS from a blood transfusion on December 1984. He was banned from attending school due to AIDS fears. He and his family launched a lawsuit against the school board in which he received national, if not global, media coverage and became the poster child for AIDS awareness. This resulted in him gaining fame, meeting celebrities such as Magic Johnson, Elton John, Michael Jackson, and even having a movie made in his honor as well as a TV special from the show Mr. Belvedere. Upon his death in 1990, President George H.W. Bush introduced the Ryan White CARE Act, the largest federally funded US program that allowed those living with HIV/AIDS to have contingency grants to be treated with the chemotherapeutic drug AZT, the treatment for AIDS back then.
While White was incredibly brave for taking a stand against AIDS discrimination at such a young age, his story is not unlike the millions who were affected by AIDS at the time. Why was White receiving such praise? Because he refused to be ashamed of having AIDS? Or rather, he had the privilege and the means to take discrimination to court to fight and be seen as a human? His legacy may have launched the humanization of AIDS patients and changed the way society views HIV/AIDS, but the fact that it took one young, straight white boy to show America AIDS could happen to any demographic is scary. Not only in the sense that AIDS could go after anyone, but the snowball effect that if Ryan White never took a stand, or even needed that transfusion, AIDS would still be left stigmatized and untreated to this day.
The 2014 Ebola Crisis
Although Ebola, a hemorrhagic virus found in Western Africa, has been known for many decades, it wasn’t until August 2014 that the World Health Organization (WHO) announced a state of emergency as Ebola was spreading at a rapid rate. Things became critical when on September 26, 2014, Thomas Duncan became the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola on the US soil. He died of the disease a week later, and the two nurses who treated him became infected as well. The WHO declared this outbreak to be the largest and most complex Ebola outbreak in history. News sources spent several weeks discussing the outbreak, how people in the US can protect themselves against it, testimonies from nurses and troops who were sent to Africa to study and help those in need (their protocol, how they were quarantined arriving back in the US, etc.) Through the help and intervention of the CDC, efficient treatments were developed. The Ebola vaccine provided highly effective protection in a trial that was done in Guinea, in 2015.
As I mentioned earlier, Ebola was not anything new. It was first discovered in 1976 due to two outbreaks of a fatal hemorrhagic fever. One occured in the Democratic Republic of Congo near the Ebola river, which gave the virus its name. The other outbreak occurred in South Sudan. Ebola is a transmittable disease and can spread to locations if the infected person travels to a different area. While Ebola was known to America ever since, it was only in 2014 that it became an issue and rapid studies to find practical treatments and a viable vaccine were a goal. It seemed that Ebola was not an issue nor a ‘fatal virus’ to Western society until there appeared a chance that it could spread to the U.S. That was because when its first casualty happened in the U.S., Africa had already been dealing with the disease for many years with little interference from international medical organizations. One could argue that those studies about Ebola have been developing over the course of years, but the fact that treatments were immediately prioritized when they reached the U.S. suggests that the Ebola crisis in Africa was not taken as of much importance to the WHO overall. If the treatments could have been developed so fast, why did parts of Africa have to suffer from the virus for so long?
The Fentanyl Crisis
Dating back to 2018, a new drug crisis roamed around North America, known as fentanyl. Fentanyl is a powerful opioid used as a pain reducer and anesthesia when mixed with other medicines. Fentanyl became a recreational drug that was often mixed with heroin, cocaine, benzodiazepines, or methamphetamines.
Fentanyl began to ravish suburban neighbourhoods, making news headlines across the country. Disturbing images of people overdosing on Fentanyl circulated around social media, trials in which doctors would illegally prescribe fentanyl to people willing to buy Fentanyl were rampant, and a strong response by the government on how to handle the crisis was immediately taken. The CDC created a commercial about the dangers of fentanyl and how to protect yourself from it.
First aid kits introduced Naloxone, a medication that can temporarily reverse an opioid overdose until emergency help can intervene. First aid and CPR classes taught how to use Naloxone on a person overdosing as well as how to look for the signs of someone overdosing on Fentanyl. Laws have been introduced to counterattack the fentanyl crisis, most notably one being Bruce’s Law.
The reason why Fentanyl received such attention and solutions to it was that this drug was most popular amongst the white demographic. In 2020 alone, over 47,000 fentanyl-related deaths were white, the leading demographic on the chart. Bruce’s Law, an Alaskan law that bolsters the prevention of illegal fentanyl distribution was named after Robert Bruce Snodgrass, a young Alaskan man who passed away from a fentanyl overdose in 2021.
If we were to go back to the 1980s, we would know about the origins of the crack cocaine epidemic. It was introduced to North America around the 1970s and spread in the 1980s. The drug could be broken into small chunks and sold in even smaller quantities, to be smashed into powder and smoked. Due to the international dealing of the drug, crack use was appearing in great numbers in Los Angeles, San Diego, Houston, and the Caribbean. Crack was usually abundant in Black, inner-city neighborhoods, which impacted Black Americans more than any other demographic. The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation claims that Black Americans, who make up 12.2% of the population “account for 37% of crack users, meaning that they are 3.5 times more likely than whites to be regular crack users.”
Due to this, Black people experienced a frightening increase in death rates, weapons arrests, and children in foster care. As of 2018, a study showed that cocaine caused long consequences for crime, resulting in a doubling of the murder rates and imprisonment amongst young Black men. Crack cocaine use and distribution became popular in cities that were in a state of social and economic chaos such as New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, particularly in their low-income inner-city neighborhoods with high African American concentrations. In a 1992 study entitled “The Setting for the Crack Era: Macro Forces, Micro Consequences (1960-1992),” E. Dunlap and B. D. Johnson, explain how crack cocaine dealing became so prominent in African-American neighborhoods.
In essence, the use, sale and distribution of crack cocaine derive from rising social distress in the inner city. This distress also adds to the “intensity of inner-city conditions, and the difficulty in alleviating them” (Dunlap and Johnson, 1992). The American economy has always been systemically discriminating against minorities. It has been prompting African Americans and Hispanics, among other migrants, to move to more northern cities where they had a slightly better chance of financial success. From 1960-1990, however, there was a shift from manufacturing goods to servicing people.
This eradication of unskilled labor was replaced by education and technical skills. Of course, this prompted resources to be distributed away from social assistance programs and other welfare services that were provided in the 1960s. This created much more difficult conditions for inner-city American neighborhoods.
The systemic racism of the labor market and educational system in African-American neighbourhoods caused African-American individuals to resort to patterns of criminal behavior which have spanned decades, effecting numerous generations. Drug dealing became a way of making income and a means of dealing with the stress of living in inner-city neighborhoods with limited education and access to legal employment.
During this whole ordeal, there had not been one initiative on how to combat cocaine overdoses, nor any educational campaigns to talk about the dangers of crack cocaine or how to stop the distribution of it. This is a problem amongst Black neighborhoods even today, where the solution is imprisonment rather than education and eradication.
The issue with the white filter is that it is an extension of white privilege; the rest of the world can only hope that Western society can spend a day in its shoes with all their issues for something to change. It is unfair, dehumanizing, and sociopathic to treat other countries as second-class citizens because their issues are none of North America’s problems. It is important to be aware of these biases so we can fight against discrimination and have our voices heard properly, and not through the voices of the oppressors.