When White Children Die Angels Cry: Of Casey Anthony, Moral Panics, and White Slavery

The world is going to hell in a handbasket. The age old con game of distracting moral panics continues with the Casey Anthony case.

The economy is dead in the water, President Barack Obama is revealing himself to be a consummate corporatist triangulator who is playing the Tea Party GOP's game of suicide with the debt limit, repressive governments continue their violence against the people's movements in the Arab world, and one more gem--manned space travel-- in what was the golden crown of U.S. Empire and global dominance has been thrown into the dust pile of history.

The latter is heavy with symbolic weight in the Age of the Great Recession: the many thousands of people who directly and indirectly depended on NASA's space shuttle program for their livelihoods will now be either in the breadline, fighting for a limited number of berths in the private sector, or most frighteningly, seeking minimum wage McJobs.

These truly important matters of national concern and well-being are sideshows and inconvenient facts to the media's obsessive coverage of the Casey Anthony case. Perhaps Stalin was correct when he said that, "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is just a statistic?" The obvious sadness at a life lost too young is a given, but the Casey Anthony trial is one more example of how race, crime, the value of human life, and justice problematically intersect in American life.

Where is the outcry when black and brown kids are kidnapped, murdered, or killed? Where is the amber alert and national panic for young children like Jada Justice? Where is the complaint and shock when the "justice" system convicts innocent poor people, or at the well documented disparities in sentencing along lines of race? Or when black and brown people who are unjustly sentenced to life sentences are left to rot on death row and found innocent decades later?

My point is ultimately a simple one. Whiteness wants justice when it is convenient. Whiteness does not want justice in all things. Nor does Whiteness want justice consistently. Thus, the howls, shocks, and surprise of "mainstream America" when to their eyes a miscarriage of justice occurs and one of their own is a victim. Justice should be sought in all things, and consistently for all people.

The media circus around the Casey Anthony case, and the curious, but not at all surprising silence when the legal system fails its other citizens, once more proves the myopia of Whiteness--and again how treason to Whiteness is loyalty to humanity...and justice for Caylee Anthony.