Earlier this week, outlaw motorcycle clubs engaged in a daylight gun battle in Waco, Texas. This combat involved hundreds of people. The mall where the riot occurred was left resembling a war zone, with hundreds of spent bullet cartridges strewn about, broken bodies everywhere, and police and other local municipal services overwhelmed. By the end of melee, nine outlaws were dead, 18 wounded, and at least 165 people were arrested; 120 guns were recovered at the crime scene.

In late April and early May, African-American young people protested the killing of Freddie Gray by the Baltimore police. Those peaceful protests escalated into a local uprising against the police. This was neither random nor unprovoked: The Baltimore uprising was a response to the long-simmering upset and righteous anger about poverty, racism, civil rights violations, and abuse by the police. No one was killed during the Baltimore protests or subsequent uprising.

The gun battle chaos in Waco was a result of rivalries between outlaw motorcycle clubs, in competition with one another for the profits from drug and gun traffic, various protection rackets, and other criminal enterprises. The Baltimore uprising was a reaction to social, economic, racial, and political injustice; a desperate plea for justice in an era of police brutality and white-on-black murder by the state.

The participants in the Waco, Texas gun battle were almost exclusively white. The participants in the Baltimore Uprising were almost all black. Quite predictably, the corporate news media’s narrative frame for those events was heavily influenced by race. News coverage of these two events has stretched the bounds of credulity by engaging in all manner of mental gymnastics in order to describe the killings, mayhem, and gun battle in Waco as anything other than a “riot.”

As writers such as Salon’s own Jenny Kutner keenly observed:

I use the terms “shootout” and “gunfire erupted” after reading numerous eyewitness reports, local news coverage and national stories about the “incident,” which has been described with a whole host of phrases already. None, however, are quite as familiar as another term that’s been used to describe similarly chaotic events in the news of late: “Riot.” Of course, the deadly shootout in Texas was exactly that: A shootout. The rival gangs were not engaged in a demonstration or protest and they were predominantly white, which means that — despite the fact that dozens of people engaged in acts of obscene violence — they did not “riot,” as far as much of the media is concerned. “Riots” are reserved for communities of color in protest, whether they organize violently or not, and the “thuggishness” of those involved is debatable. That doesn’t seem to be the case in Texas.

The dominant corporate news media have used the Baltimore uprising and other similar events to attack Black America’s character, values, and culture. The argument is clear: The events in Waco were committed by white men who happen to be criminals; the Baltimore uprising was committed by black people who, because of their “race” and “culture,” are inherently criminal.

Racial bias in news reporting has been repeatedly documented by scholars in media studies, critical race theory, political science, and sociology. As anti-racism activist Jane Elliot incisively observed, “People of color can’t even turn on the televisions in their own homes without being exposed to white racism.” The centuries of racism, and resulting stereotypes about the inherent criminality of Black Americans, are central to why the events in Waco and Baltimore have received such divergent news coverage.

In an interview about the Waco shootout, Harrold Pollock, co-director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, makes this point very clear:

I have never encountered a gang incident in Chicago remotely like this. The number of perpetrators involved — not to mention the nine deaths — far exceed the typical urban gang-related shooting. Maybe there was some gang incident in Chicago like this decades ago. But this sort of pitched battle? I’ve never heard of anything like it. If these biker gang members were non-white, I think this would cause a national freak out… But I do think that our views about urban crime are so framed by race and inequality in a variety of ways. When criminal activity seems unrelated to these factors, it doesn’t hit our national dopamine receptors in quite the same way. People tend to view these motorcycle gangs as a kind of curiosity.

Yet, there is a deep resistance by many in White America to accepting the basic fact that the mainstream American news media is habitually racist in its depiction of non-whites.

The mass media helps to create what Walter Lippman famously referred to as “the pictures inside our heads.’” The news media (and popular culture as a whole) helps individuals to create a cognitive map of the world around them by teaching lessons about life, politics, society, desire, relationships, and other values. This cognitive map also helps individuals to locate themselves relative to other groups of people in a given community. This cognitive map provides a set of rules, guidelines, and heuristics for navigating social reality.

In a society such as the United States, organized around maintaining certain hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality, how one sees themselves is often a reflection of precisely how they are not members of a given group. Those lessons are internalized on both a conscious and subconscious level; on a basic level, the in-group is defined relative to the out-group.

This is the essence of making a person or group into the Other.

Simone de Beauvoir, feminist philosopher, made this essential observation:

The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the expression of a duality — that of the Self and the Other. This duality was not originally attached to the division of the sexes; it was not dependent upon any empirical facts. It is revealed in such works as that of Granet on Chinese thought and those of DumÃ©zil on the East Indies and Rome. The feminine element was at first no more involved in such pairs as Varuna-Mitra, Uranus-Zeus, Sun-Moon, and Day-Night than it was in the contrasts between Good and Evil, lucky and unlucky auspices, right and left, God and Lucifer. Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself. If three travellers chance to occupy the same compartment, that is enough to make vaguely hostile ‘others’ out of all the rest of the passengers on the train. In small-town eyes all persons not belonging to the village are ‘strangers’ and suspect; to the native of a country all who inhabit other countries are ‘foreigners’; Jews are ‘different’ for the anti-Semite, Negroes are ‘inferior’ for American racists, aborigines are ‘natives’ for colonists, proletarians are the ‘lower class’ for the privileged.