The Curse Of Selective Outrage by Les May

THE news channel I mostly watch, AlJazeera, regularly has little snippets pointing out how easily our emotions can be manipulated by ‘fake news’ on social media.

This morning I watched the 8am news on AlJazeera. One of the items, which I knew was NOT fake news, was video of a man getting into his car and behind him stood a Wisconsin policeman firing seven bullet into the man’s back.

Yes I was outraged, but then I asked myself what was it about the scene that brought on that emotion. Was it that it was a black man who I saw being shot or was it that it was another human being who was being treated in this way? Would my sense of outrage have been the same if the victim had not been black? Would it have been the same if it had been say Chinese police shooting an unarmed man in the back?

The answer is

‘Yes it would!’

Any country which makes any pretensions to be civilised does not allow this to happen. The colour of someone’s skin does not come into the equation.