Media Shouldn’t Mute Or Devalue Our Voices

With great power comes great responsibility. The American media has influence over how people think. Sometimes members of the media who are burdened with such power can use it irresponsibly, specifically when they antagonize social movements for change in America.

McDonald’s restaurant staff has been lobbying for a higher pay than the minimum wage that most non-management workers receive. McDonald’s workers have staged walk-outs and have protested outside of restaurant locations all across  the country, demanding $15 an hour for their services. On April 15, 10,000 frustrated employees and supporters marched through the streets of New York City to the Times Square McDonald’s to express their grievances publicly.

Meanwhile, in the shadowy confines of an office in Dallas, Texas, Matt Walsh, a contributor at The Blaze, a news and entertainment website founded by conservative radio personality Glenn Beck, is responding to the McDonald’s employees.

Walsh mentions that he had to work 10 years before earning a “comfortable living” and points out that if McDonald’s employees were to receive $15 an hour, they would be making more money than teachers, firemen, and EMTs, in a letter titled: “Fast Food Workers: You Don’t Deserve $15 an Hour to Flip Burgers, and That’s OK.”

In July 2015, presidential hopeful Martin O’Malley addressed a crowd at the Netroots Nation Conference, a communion of activists demanding that he address criminal justice and police brutality.

When they shouted, “Black lives matter!” the mantra of those opposed to the killing of black Americans at the hands of police in recent months, O’Malley responded: “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter.” The mostly black demonstrators, responded by booing him loudly.

Meanwhile in the cozy enclosure of a radio station in New York, ESPN sports analyst and radio personality Stephen A. Smith offered a rebuttal to the crowd in Arizona: “I’m a black man. Of course I know Black Lives Matter. You can’t ‘boo’ a presidential candidate just [because] he says ‘all lives matter’ and followed up by asking black America ‘Where is all the noise about [Black Lives Matter] when black folks are killing black folks?”

Black people don’t think that their lives are more important than others. Fast food workers don’t think that their toil is more significant than a teacher’s. But a presidential candidate can’t ignore a crowd’s cry for change and offer a cliché as a solution.

Coupling that with the equally unfair notion that black people don’t get upset about black on black murders is wholly ignorant. The “Stop the Violence” movement has been active in American inner cities since 1988 and has addressed that issue aggressively. St. Louis based music producer and community leader, Rodney “The Average Joe” Prather put that rhetoric in perspective by noting that “after 9/11 nobody was asking ‘what about American on American crime’.”

It’s also wrong to dismiss a plea for living wages by devaluing work, (like using “flipping burgers” as an all encompassing job description for fast food workers) and cruel comparisons to skilled laborers who have not started a mass campaign to increase their own unfair wages.

Malcolm X warned in 1963, “If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

Apparently, not much has changed.