The racist silence over Iryna Zarutska

The story out of Charlotte last month is a national disgrace

Imagine if the murder of George Floyd was more racist and appalling in every way. If, instead of a meth-head home invader ominously towering at 6 feet 6 inches, who once pointed a gun at a woman’s belly, the victim was instead a tender young girl, barely out of high school, a refugee from a war-torn African state, and also, incredibly beautiful. Imagine instead of an officer of the law using a controversial chokehold, the attacker is a racist psychopath who walks up behind her and, simply because she is black, slits her throat. How much more news coverage would such a story command than the original? George Floyd was mentioned in 1.9 million articles around the world in just the first two weeks after his murder, more than President Trump in the same period and one-fifth of all Covid stories at the time. But if the victim was perfectly innocent, the killer undeniably racist, and the method involved not just an abuse of power, but a display of psychopathic evil with no room for debate, all on video, would we not expect internet-breaking levels of coverage? The George Floyd protests became the largest protests in American history, then metastasized into riots that resulted in 19 deaths and $1 to 2 billion in arson, vandalism, and looting damages, yet if the case was vastly worse, how could it possibly get almost no coverage?

Last month, a psychopathic monster slaughtered a young refugee girl on a public train in Charlotte, North Carolina. Iryna Zarutska was just 23 years old, but had already seen the face of war, having fled Kyiv in the wake of Russia’s invasion, one of the most brutal conflicts in modern history, only to be butchered on basic American public transit because she didn’t know better than to sit next to a brooding black man on a city train in America. And yes, his race matters. Iryna came to America, where she found peace, and was a student at Rowan-Cabarrus Community College. On August 22, she was coming home from a local pizzeria, where she worked part-time to help pay for her classes and school supplies. She boarded the Lynx Blue Line train and sat down, listening to her headphones, exhausted from a long day, and lost in her own world. Behind her was Decarlos Brown Jr, a 34-year-old schizophrenic homeless man with 14 prior arrests for crimes such as felony larceny, robbery, assault, and abusing the 911 system. Just months ago, Brown told authorities that a “man-made material” was controlling his body. A forensic evaluation was ordered, but never completed. In January, a local judge released him, despite his violent past, on the condition that Brown promise to return for court, thus allowing him to wander free until Iryna sat down in front of him. After staring at the back of her head for four minutes, Brown quietly unfolded a knife, jumped to his feet, and stabbed Iryna three times, including in the throat. She slumped over, blood gushing from her neck, and died. Brown strolled away, blood dripping from his knife as he casually walked past unsuspecting passengers, saying to himself, “I got that white girl. I got that white girl.”

Brown then stripped off his shirt like he had just finished a pick-up game and stood around catching his breath. Police arrested him on the platform two minutes later and charged him with first-degree murder. The killing drew national and international attention on social media. Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles called it “senseless and tragic.” Officials highlighted transit safety, fare enforcement, and failures in mental health and justice systems. CATS pledged more fare inspections, new validators, and additional security. Mecklenburg County’s district attorney cited systemic gaps. FBI Director Kash Patel and U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed city leaders. Trump wrote, “What the hell was he doing riding the train, and walking the streets?” And yet still, aside from a few local reports, the media is silent. Local news outlets, including ABC (WTVD in Charlotte) and Spectrum News 1, have reported on the incident. Fox News also covered the story, because they’re right-wing so only they get to care about a dead white girl in our current Bizarro politics. But the story has been absent from major national print outlets. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and Chicago Tribune have no visible major news or feature articles on the story. One exception to the radio silence has been a single Axios report, but this was hardly a good thing given that, as Waywardgreg wrote, “They’re blaming our ability to bear witness to these atrocities. Holy fucking shit.”

Let’s be honest, this is an incredibly sensational story that has already become national as well as international news. An innocent young woman fled Russian artillery shells only to be butchered by a black man in America. Had he been a white guy in a MAGA hat, and she a young Guatemalan immigrant, no doubt this tragedy would have millions of articles in ink by now. But the mainstream media has overwhelmingly ignored the story, and there seems to be no plausible explanation other than the politically inconvenient fact that the killer is black and the girl was white. Readers are not wrong to point out that when Daniel Penny, a white guy, subdued and subsequently killed a violent black homeless man on a subway, the media gave it endless coverage and tarred Penny as racist, but now that a black psychopath has all but gutted an innocent young white girl on a public train, the media has nothing to say, no facts to report, no analysis to help people make sense of the story in these turbulent and racially divided times. The media acts like they know better, but when an explanation is needed, they ghost us. This is journalistic malpractice, it is racist, white people are under attack in this country, and dishonest reporting, by lies or by silence, is the reason trust in journalism is at an all-time low. Readers know the decision not to run a story like this is a decision. Even foreign media such as The Times, The Daily Telegraph, and NDTV apparently care more about this poor young girl than the newspapers in the nation she came to call home. Piers Morgan asked why such a “disgusting, senseless, unprovoked murder” was “not getting more media attention?!” Konstantin Kisin called the media silence “one of the most disgusting acts of lying by omission I’ve ever seen.” Elon Musk noted the difference in reporting at AP News. Yet still, we hear nothing.

One of the greatest evils I have ever reported on was the Ethiopian government’s genocidal rape of Tigrayan women and girls. Through many interviews conducted in 2021, I came to love the people of Tigray, particularly these resilient ladies, sweet hafti of the northern highlands, who were not only gang raped, often to death, but deliberately given AIDS and vaginally butchered using broken bottles or saws so they could not give birth to more Tigrayan children. That’s a hard sentence to read, but it’s my job to tell it straight. When I initially wrote about the genocide in Tigray, I did not think racism was to blame for the lack of coverage. There were other, better explanations. But I ended up spending half a day debating the issue with WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, himself a Tigrayan, and he eventually convinced me otherwise, and taught me to pay better attention to such things. In the end, because I had publicly argued otherwise, I felt I had to publicly set the record straight, so I wrote an essay for The Nation about how racism was indeed a factor in the lack of coverage of the Tigrayan genocide. The essay was titled “There’s Genocide In Tigray, But Nobody’s Talking About It.” It’s funny, because if the interracial homicide rates were reversed, and if cops killed blacks at the rates they kill whites, people would be crying about a black genocide in America. In fact, they already do, even with the numbers as they are, yet if a cops wrongly kills a lowlife black man, he is martyred, statues are erected, thousands upon thousands of people march, and cities burn. But if a violent lunatic slaughters an innocent white girl, nobody seems to care. More and more, it really does seem like the rightwing attack against Black Lives Matter, namely that it meant only Black Lives Matter, was not too far from the truth, whereas we have been told that the healthier way of thinking, that all lives matter, is white supremacist.

The following year, when Russian tanks rolled over the Ukrainian border, the first thing I did was buy a flight over and begin interviewing refugee women and their children. Some had been raped in front of their toddlers, while others had been forced to watch their toddlers raped in front of them. It was the darkest point in my journalistic career, but also the most inspiring because, again and again, the women I spoke to made clear that what they wanted more than anything, what they seemed to beg for with their eyes, often through tears, was that at least their story would be told. It was also what my Tigrayan sisters had told me in every conversation. The most painful thought to them was not what had suffered, but that they would suffer it and the world wouldn’t give a fuck. Worse, no one would even know it happened, and they would just be screaming into the void, or voiceless, unable to even scream, suffocating in their own bottomless misery. It was the kind of hopelessness that led to suicide, and many of the women and even girls I spoke to had tried to take their lives. This reminded me, in the most powerful way, that the only reason I have a microphone as a journalist is so that I can give it to those who need one, in life or in death. I have never forgotten the lesson. It is a principle by which I live, and one by which I judge other journalists as either noble, or not fit to wear the uniform.

Say her name.