In an oft-quoted 2009 talk, novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie described “the danger of a single story,” arguing that “how they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told” is dependent on the power structures of the worlds from which they emerge. I came across Adichie’s work during college and loved it. Her message about a single story was part of what confirmed my path toward journalism and how I came to understand it: There is always more than one way to tell a story, and there’s a level of responsibility required to do it without exploitation or ego (see Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and The Murder).
When I learned that Adichie — whose short manifesto We Should All Be Feminists and other writings on gender are so ubiquitous, they’re featured on Beyoncé’s 2013 eponymous album – had adopted views that many, myself included, see as transmisogynistic, like J.K. Rowling before her, I was gutted. At the same time, Adichie’s own call for nuance helped me understand how someone I once respected could be human enough to fall prey to an ideology I assumed they would condemn. The dangers of the “official story,” stories easily spread and popularized because of how they play on our existing biases, and the distance sometimes between the official line and how we experience things in reality are clear today.
The mainstream media keeps positing skepticism about President Biden as (often warranted) concern for our gerontocracy, but as many Gen Z'ers have told us time and again, their apathy regarding the 2024 election is about his track record on key issues like climate and student debt. People keep saying “#MeToo went too far,” but the rise of the manosphere says otherwise. Even the paper of record deals in “bothsiderism” when reporting on trans lives.
Adichie highlighting the multiple ways to represent a single incident or even a person explains so much of the debunking and calling-out that has become part of my job. Right-wingers with massive platforms, like Tucker Carlson and Libs of Tiktok’s Chaya Raichik, can mobilize their millions of followers against high school girls and trans people as a whole without having to rely on telling the truth, apparently indifferent to how their social media campaigns have real-world consequences.
This week, two killings drew intense news and social media attention, in part because of the political views held by those who were killed. Early on the morning of October 2, 39-year-old LGBTQ+ journalist Josh Kruger was shot seven times; Kruger was pronounced dead within an hour of being brought to a hospital. Before going freelance a few years ago, Kruger worked for the city of Philadelphia’s offices of homeless services and the health department. Police suspect the killing was “the result of a domestic dispute or may have been drug-related,” per the Inquirer.
In Brooklyn, also early that same Monday morning, 31-year-old organizer Ryan Carson was stabbed to death while waiting for the bus with his girlfriend after a wedding. Carson was known in New York for his advocacy around harm reduction, as was recalled in a memorial post from State Rep. Julia Salazar.
Those who knew Kruger and Carson began sharing condolences. Elsewhere, others started cracking jokes.
Online, right-wing agitators like Andy Ngô exposed Carson’s girlfriend — who just days ago witnessed her boyfriend’s killing in footage that is now going viral — to their millions of rabid followers, who proceeded to make fun of her for attending Black Lives Matter protests and writing “ACAB” (for “all cops are bad”). I saw others post that Kruger’s death was somehow related to his unwillingness to condemn Philly district attorney Larry Krasner or to call our home city “ruined” by crime. (I wouldn’t either.) Ann Coulter made light of Carson’s death because he condemned police brutality against protesters.
This morning New York magazine ran a headline that said “Don’t Celebrate When People You Disagree With Get Murdered,” explaining how little influence abolitionist and left politics had over their deaths.
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I’m often consumed by how media coverage fails to honor those we lose. There’s such ugly intent in the trope of the modern martyr, as our longtime education columnist Mary Retta wrote about Breonna Taylor in The Cut (and scholar Safiya Noble about Trayvon Martin). As a movement reporter, witnessing and depicting our collective grief is important. It enrages me when I see people online obsessed with “free speech” using the concept to celebrate the deaths of those killed at random in our fundamentally unsafe society.
Obviously, this outcome, which I’ve seen online several times before, is unfair and disrespectful to all. I acknowledge that I’m particularly sensitive about this: When I read Kruger’s work, I was a little shaken, realizing how similar our reporting is. My mom called to ask if I’d heard about Carson’s death, paranoid because she knows I’ve spent a lot of time “doing what he does”: organizing.
I’ve known for a while that if I die early in my career, at random or via the police or due to poor health, there will undoubtedly be right-wing hacks dancing on my grave, crowing over the thousands of words I’ve written about the realities of policing, advocating for a more serious definition of “safety.” This is an understanding that anyone working for a better world comes to terms with eventually, one way or another. For me, it’s mostly painful when I think of the loved ones left to watch in our stead. That dynamic is dictated by the terms of the internet.
In this job, I get verbally abused online on a near daily basis. In spring 2021, before I was hired for my current role, Ngô randomly screen-capped a tweet of mine and tweeted it to his hundreds of thousands of followers (compared with my 1,000), describing me intentionally as a “Teen Vogue contributor,” saying I was explaining why “Antifa” believes “looting and business destruction are honorable and great.” That’s also not what I had said. (This is pretty par for the course for Ngô, who left the US and from a distance now posts about fights between American middle schoolers leading to evacuations over bomb threats, while winning $300,000 in legal damages from protesters.)
That was my first bad experience getting yelled at online at that scale — and it wasn’t even over an article. At that time, like Kruger before his death, I was freelancing. Now when I get backlash for my work, I have a workplace to turn to for support.
But if you are oriented in any way toward social justice, this is the reality on the internet — doubly or triply so if you’re online as an LGBTQ+ person, a Black person, a person of color, etc. The last year has ratcheted up the permissibility of harassment against marginalized people and communities. All the politicians I speak to who identify publicly as LGBTQ+ are being accused of grooming children. The “CRT” discourse has made its way from social media to state legislatures, becoming justification for book bans.
The right is trying to make even discussing the existence of marginalized lives a risky undertaking, enabled by politicians who misunderstand how to improve the web. And with tech overlords like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg setting the terms of online engagement, there’s not a lot of hope for this side of the internet. It’s not like this impacts only the people who sign up for a platform, such as politicians and journalists — the national harassment of Dylan Mulvaney literally de-platformed her for months for the crime of being herself on her own social media account.
Sure, we can all assume that some horrible crap will always float to the surface on the web. But public sentiment doesn’t treat all deaths the same. People immediately jumped at the chance to discourage jokes about the deaths of Sen. Dianne Feinstein or the Queen of England, women who held power for decades and impacted countless lives through policy. Meanwhile, apparently, the tragic deaths of people only known to the public for the circumstances of their killings are fair game for right-wing personalities to dunk on.
It is disrespectful enough to ridicule the dead, and crueler still to use their deaths to advance systems they fought against in life. New York mayor Eric Adams claimed the NYPD “won’t rest” until they bring Carson’s killer “to justice.” We can’t know what that justice will look like, but we can make inferences about what that means to him given his administration’s unwillingness to close the city’s jails, particularly the incredibly troubled Rikers, and his broad support for the NYPD.
An 18-year-old has been charged with Carson’s killing and, as of Friday, a 19-year old is being pursued in connection to Kruger's. We’ll never know for sure what the victims would consider justice, but I think of Carson’s initial response to that young person, attempting to de-escalate, and of reporting that suggests Kruger was “trying to help” the 19-year-old out. I think of an interview we ran earlier this year with abolitionists Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie: “Children are equally seen as culpable beings," Kaba told Teen Vogue. "They're not seen as people who are in development or on the cusp of growing, needing even more love and care and support than any other person might need.”
There have been so many unjust deaths of young people this year, that were unlikely to be prevented by policing, some that may have been made worse: O’Shae Sibley, 28, killed while vogueing at a Brooklyn gas station; Banko Brown, 24, killed in San Francisco over shoplifting snacks from a Walgreens; Manny “Tortuguita” Terán, 26, the forest defender, shot 57 times and, according to an independent autopsy, with their hands raised; 29-year-old father Tyre Nichols killed by police; the Club Q shooting, where 28-year-old Daniel Aston died with four others. Hell, what about all the school shootings and lockdowns? Nashville? Two at UNC in the last month?
Do you remember all of these? How could you, when they get reported at breakneck speed, and each death is treated as a headline rather than a community damaged?
What I know is this: These stories deserved more time than I could give them and, in many cases, better treatment than they got from the rest of mainstream media, let alone from right-wing vultures circling the corpses. Maybe we can remember them better by making it harder to bastardize their deaths.
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