## Notes --- - [[a lot of true crime content is copaganda]] - [[the true crime genre is seen as being overwhelmingly white]] - the whiteness of true crime impacts who we see as a victim and what we see as a crime ## Summary --- The true crime genre appears to be overwhelmingly white — focusing on white victims, white cops, and white prosecutors. This is, in part, because “[w]riters of color were excluded from the beginning”; Green explains that American true crime can be traced back to the National Police Gazette, the success of which led to True Detective Mysteries and, later, Official Detective Stories. These articles often contained information from law enforcement, which was already overwhelmingly white — as were reporters. Mel Watkins, the first Black editor for *The New York Times*‘s Sunday Book Review, explains that, “There was a reluctance to let Blacks write in an authoritative manner about realistic injustices.” The whiteness of true crime has several implications, including what the public even considers a crime or who the public considers a victim. Further, it influences people’s perception of law enforcement and the criminal justice system; stories tied up in a neat judicial bow “frames the justice system as inherently just”. ## Highlights --- >White voices and victims dominate the genre, which can skew the perception of what constitutes a crime. >…it matters a great deal that most true crime focuses on white police officers and detectives, white victims, and white prosecutors working to avenge them—aimed, said Lowery, “at a presumed white audience.” He believes, rightly, that this is effectively a judgment about what constitutes a sympathetic victim. >…the color barrier has influenced Americans’ impression of crime itself. >Lowery said Little remaining under the cultural radar “speaks to the extent to which the subjective decisions that are made about what to portray in true crime is a financial decision, made based on what is __presumed__ a white audience will care about.” >Generations of readers have been led to believe that murder victims most often are women killed by men and that Black serial murderers are rare. Neither assertion is true. [According to the FBI](https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6.xls), the majority of homicide victims are men killed by other men, and the race of serial murderers is [commensurate](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/5-myths-about-serial-killers-and-why-they-persist-excerpt/) with the racial makeup of the U.S. as a whole. >“[True crime] frames the justice system as inherently just, and it frames long prison sentences as something to aspire toward,” says journalist [Rachelle Hampton](https://slate.com/author/rachelle-hampton). “It very much sets up a neat line between __us__—people who are not incarcerated—and __them__, people who are incarcerated.” >The genre is so white largely because the definition of crime is so narrow. >Thrasher pointed to [a lecture delivered by former _Guardian_ columnist Gary Younge in 2016](https://gijn.org/2016/03/11/sometimes-dog-bites-man-really-is-the-story-and-we-keep-missing-it/), in which Younge cited the tired maxim, attributed to a New York newspaper editor: __When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.__ But what if, asked Younge, we’ve got it backward? What if [the thousand people shot and killed by police](https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/) in the last year is the real story? Or what if the dog-bites-man story is quite literal? He cited a [Department of Justice report](https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf) on the Ferguson protests, which found that “in every canine bite incident for which racial information is available, the subject was African American.” > >If a dog bites man again and again and again, that, too, is a story. >After all, as Walter Lowe told me, you can’t sell a product for which there is no audience. To have more books, features, and podcasts by and about nonwhite people, there must be a demand for them. (There is.) In order for there to be sufficient, recognized demand, he said, nonwhite victims must be seen as people. That part, maddeningly, is not a given.