Why aren’t Chicago’s shootings included in outcry over recent violence?

When a gunman killed four people and wounded a fifth at a Southern California office building last week, news outlets, over and over, called it the third in a string of mass shootings.

“The violence in the city of Orange was the third major mass shooting in just over two weeks,” an Associated Press story published on chicagotribune.com read. “Last week a gunman opened fire at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, and killed 10. A week before that, six Asian women were among eight people killed at three Atlanta-area spas.” No mention of Chicago. In Sunday’s New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote a column headlined, “How do we stop the parade of gun deaths?” Chicago gun deaths were nowhere to be found.

But 15 people were shot at a party in Chicago’s Park Manor neighborhood on March 14 (two days before the Atlanta-area shootings) and eight people were shot outside a Wrightwood neighborhood storefront on March 26 (four days after the Boulder shooting and five days before the Orange shooting.)

What does it say that the violence here is so rarely included in larger discussions — in the media, among politicians — about mass shootings and the trauma they inflict on our nation?

“Mass shootings are mass shootings when they involve white people,” Shaka Rawls, principal of Leo Catholic High School in Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood, told me. “When they’re Black people, it’s just something that happened over there. When it’s violence perpetrated by and on Black people, the mainstream media can easily turn its back and say, ‘This is what happens in those communities.’ But the impact is huge on those communities.”

I called Rawls because the school he leads is located down the street from the funeral home where 15 people were shot on a Tuesday evening in July. Rawls raced to the scene as soon as he heard the news.

“I will never unsee that,” he said. “I’m traumatized by that, and this isn’t my first rodeo. People are laid out on the ground. People are crying. There’s no ambulance on the scene yet. I’m a school principal. I’m not trained for this.”

But in the days and weeks that followed, he found himself having to advocate for his students and staff to receive counseling and support, when he expected to be fielding offers of help.

“So many things that happen in my community are not looked at as violence perpetrated on human beings,” he said. “Sometimes we have to remind people that these are humans. The people experiencing this trauma are humans.”

On a day-to-day basis, Chicago’s gun violence doesn’t go unnoticed or unremarked upon. City residents and leaders face near-constant criticism and ridicule for our devastatingly high number of shootings and deaths.

But I hear those shootings and deaths lobbed as a jeer far more often than I hear them urgently, thoughtfully discussed as a crisis deserving of all-handson-deck solutions. And the failure to include Chicago in the national discourse about mass shootings feels like a symptom of this larger problem: an “othering” of our violence — as if it isn’t as tragic, isn’t as much of an assault on humanity, isn’t as deserving of widespread calls for answers and reform.

“It’s because we’re killing each other, so it’s nothing out of the ordinary,” said Danielle Stipe-Patterson, 32, who lives in Park Manor. “When it should be out of the ordinary. This is traumatic. This is trauma. I can’t even watch certain TV shows because I’m living it. Why watch it for entertainment when I literally hear the gunshots every other night?”