The Illegal Immigrant

Over spring break I had the misfortune of watching Fox News and the snippet of The O’Reilly Factor. I was mostly paying attention to the book in front of me while my boyfriend’s father watched the show but I couldn’t block it out completely. The one clip that really affected me was Bill O’Reilly’s coverage of the news story of a 20-ish year old girl who had been killed. The headline for this story was something along the lines of “Illegal Immigrant Kills Woman.”

Three things bothered me about this and the coverage of the story.

1 – If there had been no picture accompanying the headline of the illegal immigrant, I wouldn’t know a single other fact about him. The five times they referred to him he was only called the illegal immigrant.

2 – He did not murder her. She died in a car accident that was his fault but he did not seek her out and kill her, it was an accident.

3 – There was hardly any coverage on the victim. I was sitting there waiting for him to give an account of her life and all the things they typically say about white women who are killed but he shared almost no details about her.

Then I realized that these things are true because all that mattered in his broadcast of this story was that an illegal immigrant had done something awful.

This got me thinking about titles. Going back to my first problem with this story, I wondered what other aspects there were to this illegal immigrants life. From his picture I could tell he was a man in his mid-twenties but that’s it. O’Reilly framed his story in a way that left me no other possible choice but to associate this illegal immigrants and all illegal immigrants with crime and bad things that we don’t want in America. While I believe that people should not come into this country illegally I know that most do because they have no other choice and that just because on of them does something wrong doesn’t mean they should all be executed (or hidden behind a wall, Trump).

I also started thinking about intersectionality. This illegal immigrant undoubtedly belongs to many other groups and titles but was denied all of them except man and criminal. Not only was he denied his own titles but so was his victim in an attempt to give her the only 3 titles she needed (white, woman, victim) to condemn the illegal immigrant even further. While I realize they only have so many minutes to spend on each story, it seems that to be denied your different group titles, especially the positive ones, is unethical.

As I continued thinking about this I tried to think of all the titles I hold from my in-groups…

White

Female

American

Texan

Southern

Educated

Twenty-year-old

College student

Art student

Travler

Driver

Reader

Soccer player

Scrapbooker

Sister

Daughter

Child of divorce

Cousin

Niece

Granddaughter

Friend

Sorority woman

Zeta Tau Alpha

Brunet

Short

Busty

I was a little shocked as my list continued to grow in my head and realized that if any single one of these was taken away, my entire being would change. Every aspect of who I have become in 20 years was built on the foundation of these groups interacting together through me. Which ones on this list would I be willing to have taken from me for the sake of a shitty, politically framed news story?