Sympathy For The Devil
Why We Only Find Humanity When the Villain Dies
We live in a culture where the first thing people want to know about a Black person killed by police, a vigilante, or a state-sanctioned needle is whether they had a record, smoked weed, or wore the wrong hoodie. Mug shots, grainy security footage, and cherry-picked “thug” photos flood the airwaves as if their death needs a justification we can consume over breakfast.
But when someone like Charlie Kirk, a man who spent his career mainstreaming bigotry, radicalizing college students against the marginalized, and actively lobbying to make life worse for women, queer people, immigrants, and people of color, gets killed? Suddenly, we are reminded he is a husband. A father. A son. A good man who loved his country.
Mainstream liberals, yes even the “good” ones, dutifully take to the airwaves to remind us of his “humanity.” They cry on camera. They tweet (we happily deadname Twitter here) calls for compassion. They stage digital candlelight vigils.
Where were these vigils for Marcellus Williams as the state prepared to strap him to a gurney despite evidence of innocence?
Where were these tears for Tamir Rice, executed by police at age twelve for playing with a toy gun?
Where were the fatherly portraits for Trayvon Martin, stalked and killed for walking home from a convenience store, while his killer, George Zimmerman, would go on to sell the very gun that killed him, calling it a piece of American history?
Where was the humanizing soft-focus montage for the victims of Dylann Roof’s church massacre before the cameras went back to Roof’s bowl cut, and before we learned police bought him Burger King on the way to jail because “he hadn’t eaten in a while”?
Where was the national coverage when Nia Wilson was murdered in Oakland, only trending after activists forced it into the spotlight?
Meanwhile, after Kirk’s assassination, we got bipartisan condemnation and wall-to-wall coverage. Celebrities wept. High-profile liberal influencers posted heartfelt tributes. And every article reminded us he was a husband, a father, a beloved son, because it was crucial that we see him as fully human.
The Script of Selective Sympathy
This is what philosopher Miranda Fricker calls epistemic injustice: whose story we count as knowable, whose suffering we accept as intelligible.
Black death is treated as a statistic, a natural consequence. Reactionary white death is framed as an aberration that threatens the social order. The system cannot survive without re-humanizing its own architects.
And the numbers back it up: homicides of white victims lead to arrests in about 63% of cases, compared to just 46% for Black victims (source). Media framing is worse, outlets are more likely to humanize white victims and to soft-pedal police culpability when the victim is Black.
The Comfort of Condemning Violence
This is not a call to dance on graves. It is a call to interrogate why our empathy scales so selectively. Why we perform universal compassion only when the victim was someone the system already deemed worthy of life.
Violence is bad. Full stop. But the moral panic over this one killing is not about peace, it is about order. It is about making sure the rest of us get the message: you are not allowed to respond in kind.
Final Thought
If you shed tears for Charlie Kirk but not for Marcellus Williams, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Atatiana Jefferson, Stephon Clark, Walter Scott, Botham Jean, Rekia Boyd, Mya Hall, Aura Rosser, Amadou Diallo, Alton Sterling, Sean Bell, Rumain Brisbon, Jonathan Ferrell, Korryn Gaines, Natasha McKenna, Eric Harris, Terrence Crutcher, Jordan Davis, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, Elijah McClain, Daunte Wright, Dijon Kizzee, Ma’Khia Bryant, Walter Wallace Jr., Tyre Nichols, Tanisha Anderson, Alva Braziel, Robert Fuller, Manuel Ellis, Laquan McDonald, Akai Gurley, Kajieme Powell, Sean Monterrosa, Mario Woods, Oscar Grant, John Crawford III, Jordan Edwards, Antwon Rose II, Tony McDade, Kathryn Johnston, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Sonya Massey, Emmett Till, and countless others whose names we may never know, your compassion is not universal. It is curated. And it is curated to keep the same hierarchy intact that put them all in the ground.
Sympathy for the devil is a luxury the damned are never afforded.
