Is the Value We Place on a Child’s Life Colorblind?

The 1995 gang-related murder of 3-year-old Stephanie Kuhen in Cypress Park provoked great sorrow and outrage both within and beyond Los Angeles. In newspapers and on nightly TV newscasts across the country, photos of the slain girl with wispy blonde hair and sad blue eyes appeared alongside images of the grafitti-stained wall at the entrance of the alley in which she had been shot. Her tragic “wrong-way murder,” as the media labeled it, deepened the impression that no one, not even a toddler asleep in the back seat of her family car, is safe from random violence.

The circumstances of Stephanie’s death inspired many calls for tougher action against violent--particularly gang--crime. Days after the shooting, President Bill Clinton invoked her memory in a speech to an association of law-enforcement officers. In his 1996 State of the State address, Gov. Pete Wilson reminded us of her murder before proposing to put more cops on the street. In Los Angeles, both the Police Department and the district attorney’s office pressed hard to find Stephanie’s murderers. Last Monday, a panel of jurors convicted three gang members of her slaying. But in Cypress Park and neighborhoods like it throughout Southern California, the “wrong-way murder” has refocused attention on a problem that will not go away until we re-examine how and why we value people’s lives differently.

Most residents of Cypress Park, a relatively stable, predominately Latino working-class neighborhood northeast of downtown, will tell you they are pleased that the men responsible for murdering Stephanie are going to prison. They will also vent their anger at the media for its seemingly unrelenting coverage of Stephanie’s and her family’s harrowing experience. Indeed, many Latinos, no matter from which neighborhood, social class or generation, felt that the murder was front-page news only because the victim was white.

In 1995, Stephanie’s was one of 10 gang-related murders of children under age 10 in Los Angeles County. Among the victims were three 1-year-olds and one 2-year-old. Presumably, these Latino and black children were no less innocent than Stephanie. Nor were their deaths less tragic. Yet, why did their murders not make front-page headlines or prompt calls to clamp down on gang violence?

In an intellectual climate where moral distinctions between black-on-black and black-on-white crime are routinely made, it isn’t hard to believe that the interethnic component of the “wrong-way murder” fanned the intense attention it received. Are the murders of young, nonwhite kids by members of their own ethnic or racial group just too ordinary or expected to warrant similar attention?

There is an unconscious element of blame in all this, as if the innocent Latino or black victim of violence is somehow more responsible for their fates. Perhaps it just makes more sense, and is thus judged less newsworthy, that urban violence would take the life of yet another non-white child. America’s social ills are seen as more outrageous and less tolerable when they affect whites.

The media’s penchant to highlight Latino criminality at the expense of a broader perspective on Latino humanity also plays into the frustration of Cypress Park residents. Many resent that their heretofore overlooked neighborhood of mostly single-family homes has suddenly become principally known as the place where a little girl was murdered. Such demonization implicates all residents.

Cypress Park has its problems, residents say, but they are nowhere near as overwhelming as media portrayals would suggest. Besides, when the problems only affected them, no outsiders seemed to care much. In the weeks following the incident, several families who live nearest the alleyway that the Kuhen family drove down at 1:30 a.m. said police commonly ignored or were lax in responding to their own calls regarding gang members congregating there. They told reporters that the gangs regularly sold drugs in the alleyway; some even believed that Stephanie’s murder was less a result of a wrong turn than a drug deal gone awry. Yet, though a few reporters did write that two of the men in the Kuhen car had previous drug-related arrests, most media stuck to the racial and moral simplicity of the public’s first take on the tragedy.

All this underscores the difficulty an increasingly multiethnic America is having reconfiguring the idea of who exactly “we” are at the dawn of the next millennium. If culture is a collective conversation about what is important to us as a people, as sociologist Robert Bellah has put it, the American dialogue has not sufficiently expanded beyond its generally assumed base of whiteness. Without a doubt, Stephanie captured the media’s imagination because she was perceived as being more “our” child than the other children murdered that year.

While the presumption of the preeminence of whiteness is not in any way new, it is increasingly harder to sustain in regions of the country becoming less and less white. Such an attitude now runs the risk of creating distrust, if not disdain, among the majority of the population in most urban regions of the United States. It’s not that Stephanie shouldn’t have been portrayed as being “our” child, it’s just that we should stop acting as if she were the only one.