“I’ll f***ing kill you,” Florida Atlantic University African-American student Jonatha Carr screamed at her professor, just before shouting in the face of one white classmate, and striking another on the head. “You, you, you ain’t black,” she screamed at them.
The violent student was eventually dragged out by police, and reportedly subdued with a taser.
She made quite a media sensation this week after her wild racist outburst was caught on camera. News outlets all over the country picked up the story.
But there was something odd about all the media coverage. If you simply read the headlines yesterday, you might have come away with the impression that the student was upset that her professor was teaching evolution. Maybe you would have guessed she was an unhinged creationist or a religious zealot.
The Huffington Post headline read: “Florida Atlantic University Student Has Violent Outburst in Class Discussing Evolution.”
Fellow student Rachel Bustamante wrote that Carr was asking “absurd questions” during a review section about female selection among peacocks, and eventually went on to ask why “evolution kills black people” in an increasingly insistent manner.
“FAU student snaps during lecture on evolution,” read the headline at the New York Daily News.
Why did media outlets focus on the class’s subject matter–evolution–rather than the racial motivation behind the student’s wild actions? The discussion of natural selection appears to have somehow set her off, but, really, if you listen to what she’s saying in the video, the relevance of evolution to this story is tangential at best.
The reality is quite simple: She had a bad case of–let’s call it “Racial Rage.” (Not to be confused with “road rage” or “Rachel Ray.”)
Why then wasn’t race mentioned in the above headlines when it seems to be at the center of this story?
Could it be that the mainstream media was primed to frame the story as a case of someone who was upset that her professor was teaching evolution–another right wing nut case turned violent? Meanwhile, major news outlets weren’t so primed to frame the story as a simple case of a young woman who was threatening to kill non-blacks in her class–a simple case of racial hatred.
With their odd focus on evolution, news outlets confused readers who wanted to know what this story was really about. This woman’s actions were motivated by racism, not opposition to the theory of evolution.
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