Why the Charleston massacre is news and Chicago shootings aren’t

It was New York &#8212 the ’70s. America was emerging from a civil rights movement that charted a course toward equality as a young John Curley sat in a Manhattan restaurant with his grandfather.

“I was in a really nice restaurant with my grandfather who came from the south &#8212 North Carolina,” Curley told co-host Tom Tangney on KIRO Radio’s Tom and Curley Show.

“We were in the Ritz-Carlton, in New York City,” Curley noted. “And [he] in a loud, outdoor, no whisper voice, referred to the waiter as the N word.”

“And this was a very wealthy man. This was 1975 or ’74,” he said. “And I was shocked. I wanted to crawl under the table. To him that was a part of the south that was still alive,” Curley said.

It’s a story that serves as an example, for John, of how far the country has come over the decades since the 1950s, in light of the recent shooting in Charleston, SC. A shooting, allegedly carried out by Dylann Roof and motivated by racism.

“Certainly, racism was out and above board back in the day; now most people are smart enough to realize this isn’t socially cool and they maybe feel it’s OK to talk among their friends in a certain way, but it’s more suppressed,” Tangney said. “But no doubt, there is less racism now in this country because we’ve given it a high profile.”

Coverage of the shooting has somewhat perplexed Curley, because to him, it is an anomaly. Race shouldn’t play as much of a factor in the issue, as the fact that shootings are happening often in America.

“Last July, 84 people were shot in Chicago over a weekend; 16 died,” Curley said. “Why didn’t anybody talk about any of that? Eighty-four people shot?”

Because, as Curley often notes, it’s not news if it happens all the time, Tangney said. Shootings in Chicago have become common, whereas the Charleston shooting was motivated by hatred and racism, and that doesn’t happen as much anymore.

“You should cover it, but if you’re going to cover shootings, killings, black people being killed, then you cover the 84 people shot in Chicago,” Curley said. “If we are going to say that black lives matter, we say that all lives matter, black or white. A black life matters if it was taken by a black person, and a black life matters if it was taken by a white person.”

“Shouldn’t that be a problem that it’s happening all the time?” Curley asked.

But that’s not the whole story, Tangney notes. The shootings in Chicago could stem from entirely different causes.

“I’m not saying this Dylann guy is representative of anyone beyond himself,” Tangney said. “In this particular case, he killed those people because they are black.”

Both hosts noted that perhaps no country has emerged from systematic racism so quickly as the United States has since the ’60s civil rights movement. But while racist laws, and many attitudes have faded from the country’s mainstream, there remains fringe perceptions lingering from the past. Tangney encountered one just last year.

“I took a walking tour of a Civil War [site] in Wilmington, North Carolina, and it was told from a guy who was a Confederate sympathizer. His take on life was very bizarre to me,” Tangney recalled. “He called Abraham Lincoln a ‘tyrant,’ that what he did was treasonous, that he caused the Civil War to happen as a way to undermine the Southern economy.”