By the time help arrived, Luis Ramirez lay convulsing in the middle of the street, foam running from his mouth.

Blows had struck the 25-year-old illegal Mexican immigrant with such force that they left a clotted, bruised impression of Jesus Christ on the skin of his chest from the religious medal he wore.

His attackers were white teenagers, including star students and football players, witnesses told police.

After a night of drinking, the teens taunted the undocumented worker with racial epithets, pummeled him to the ground and then kicked him in the head, court documents charge. He died in a hospital two days later.

from this article on CNN.com

If you were to read the first four sentences of this article only, you would know that Luis Ramirez was an “illegal Mexican immigrant,” an “undocumented worker,” who was beaten to death. And that’s pretty much all you would know.

If you continued to read the first half of this article, you would find out that before being attacked, he “responded to the name-calling with his own insults, which escalated the confrontation.” That the white teenagers who started the fight, and ultimately ended it, were not actually responsible for “escalating” it – apparently that was his own fault.

You’d also know that upon reaching a “a dusty park on Vine Street…Ramirez asked the couple to drop [him and a 15 year-old girl] off so they could walk. What happened next depends on the narrator.” And you might think he was already up to something shady. At this point, the writer has tried to make it clear that Ramirez is not faultless in his own death, after having already come to the country illegally, set out to walk a teenage girl home alone at night, and “escalated the confrontation.”

Later, the writer also makes it a point to tell us about the assailants – bear in mind, there’s no debate about whether these teenagers actually killed Ramirez, nobody is questioning that fact. Their lawyer says “you would be proud to have any of these kids…as your children” We learn about their high grades, their athletic achievements. If you’ve ingested the news in this country for enough years, you know this, the white guy(s) always has a story. The other guy(s) – to put it shortly – don’t. (See here and here for just a couple of examples.)

It isn’t until much later in the article that we learn more details that help paint a better picture of the deceased. He had a fiance, who was in fact local and white herself, so he wasn’t a stereotypical “making money here, sending it to Mexico” you hear so many people talk about. The 15 year-old girl he was walking home at night was his future sister-in-law. The first threats from the drunk white boys were directed toward her, so it’s pretty understandable that he would have been nervous and tried his best to stand up to them.

But the point of it is that they put all those details way down in the story. If you only read the first half of the article, which is what I usually do, you would have seen the description of immigrant men that CNN is comfortable with. Faceless. Family-less. That’s the image we start with. The details that come later – they can only do so much to change the perception.

It’s almost as though CNN wants the reader to believe there were 4 or 5 things Ramirez could have done to avoid being killed. Whereas the kids who killed him, well, this was their first mistake ever.

Tags: violence

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 3:25 PM and is filed under stuff in the newspaper. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.