“What? Nobody got shot?”: Representations of Caribana violence
We can again look to coverage of the Gay pride parade for comparison. In the same issue of the Toronto Star that gave the 26th June 2006 parade such a glowing review, there is a separate article in the B section recounting an alarming spate of shootings that happened at the same time. However, the gay pride parade was not incriminated in any way for these crimes, which is as it should be. If an event is unrelated, it should not be in the same article, this artificial juxtaposition creates the impression of a connection between the two events when one does not exist. One can only imagine if similar crimes had occurred during Caribana weekend, if they had, it is doubtful that the writer would simply blame the balmy weather for the violence as she does with the trite maxim that “as the mercury climbs, so does the number of victims” (Powell B2).
As we can see, the media creates an uneducated discourse though the language it uses to associate crime with the Caribana festival itself whether something happens at the festival or not. This point was expressed by Mr. Henry Gomez during his interview with us, “There are rarely any incidents of violence at Caribana. But from the Monday to the Friday if there is anything that happens in the city it is blamed on Caribana. …This perception isn’t right, because Caribana is pretty much violence free. It is a safe festival with minimal violence. See, the media needs negativity. If it bleeds it leads. People watch the news and they ask ‘What? Nobody got shot?’ Look at the Entertainment district, … There are fights and shootings every weekend. But it’s not a big, big thing. The ownership is all white people. It’s white establishment and all of those people have means and connections to suppress the bad publicity” (Gomez).
Mr. Gomez places the onus on the media as to why Caribana has been perceived to have such a negative connotation associated with it by continuously linking it to violence. This works to hinder the festival as a whole because the general public always perceived to have the festival associated with violence even though it is probably the biggest revenue generator the city has during the summer months. This works to stigmatize the festival and associate it with the black minority that runs it as being uncivilized because they always put forward a festival which is prone to violence and nothing substantial has been done to curve the violence problem. Mr. Gomez also points out that the reason why this bad press associated with Caribana is so noticeable is because those who head the festival, a strong West Indian black minority within the city do not hold the means or power to suppress this kind of publicity unlike their club owner counterparts who have an incident of violence occurring almost every weekend by are able to suppress it.
August 2nd, 2009 at 8:29 am
Pride has never has a homocide where millions of people gather each – just like Caribana – but unlike Pride looking at pure stats, statistically Caribana party-goers are more prone to be violent.
August 4th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
@ Seth. You missed the point. (or proved the point) Completely. We are talking about representations of violence.
The gay pride parade is used as a counter point to highlight how violence is portrayed in the media. It is pointless to compare the two as festivals because they are different kinds of events.
The point is not which festival attracts a more violent crowd, the point is how ‘the story’ of Caribana can not be told without some mention of violence, whether or not any violence even took place.
The question is why does the media work to portray Caribana as inherently violent even when nothing happens?