What do you call a woman who throws her body across kids to keep them being killed?
A hero? No...a woman performs a heroic act, to prevent rooftop sniper from killing kids, and not a peep from the media..instead she is vilified for her heroic act..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/26/zurana-horton-hero-children-gunfire
At first blush, it's the kind of story made for the insta-news cycle of 21st-century media: a mother picking up her kid up from school in Brooklyn spots a rooftop sniper, throws herself into the line of fire to protect a group of schoolkids and, while saving them, is shot and killed herself. Most likely, if Zurana Horton were white and blonde, she would have been catapulted to the top of the news, her short and tragic story the stuff of People magazine covers and breathless segments on the Today show. After all, we're a society obsessed with the stories of pretty white women and girls who come up missing or dead. Witness the endless coverage over Natalee Holloway, or Caylee Anthony, or the scary story du jour: missing baby Lisa.
But Horton, who was 34, was neither white nor blonde nor particularly photogenic: the first published picture of her was a blurry shot where large sunglasses obscured most of her smiling face. Nor did she have the kind of squeaky-clean narrative that fits easily into the feel-good story mould. She was poor, unmarried and the mother of 13; she lived in Brownsville, one of Brooklyn's most notorious neighbourhoods. And she was black. On Monday, police charged three youths with the shooting.Instead of being heralded for her bravery, Horton's life is currently being held up for scrutiny and debate in the blogosphere.
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here's nothing like the internet to highlight just how far we haven't come in this allegedly "post-racial" era of ours. Race is such a lightning rod, still, and the relative anonymity of the wild, wild web seems to unleash the worst in many of us. More often than not, our racial anxieties get played out in the comments sections. It's interesting to note that Horton's personal history came under attack from commenters of all races – black, white and other. Horton's story becomes a kind of racial Rorschach blot, with everyone projecting his or her own fears and biases on to her tragedy.
Our willingness to judge Zurana Horton and find her wanting says a lot more about us than it does about this one heroic woman's life.
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