Last night, Colorado authorities decided to drop all charges against John Mark Karr, the man who confessed to the rape and murder of Jonbenet Ramsey. Although Karr offered a detailed confession, his comments were contradicted by mounting evidence he was not even in Boulder, Colorado during Christmas holidays of 1996, much less the killer. Hopefully, the weeklong media frenzy surrounding the case will finally cease and we can return to our regularly schedule lives.

Don’t get me wrong; I am truly saddened and devastated by the six-year-old beauty queen’s tragic death. Like all murder cases, it is my sincerest hope that hers is solved and the guilty parties are brought to swift justice.

Still, enough is enough.

Ever since John Mark Carr’s first offered his questionable confession last week, America has relapsed into its addiction to JonBenet Ramsey. Just like ten years ago, when the six-year-old beauty queen was found strangled in her Colorado home, we have been fed a steady diet of images and stories about her and her alleged killer. Unfortunately, our collective obsession with the case reflects, obscures, and exacerbates larger social problems.

The considerable attention heaped upon the Ramsey case has come at the expense of other, equally important investigations regarding people of color. For example, the corpse of Chanel Petro-Nixon, a 16-year-old straight-A student from Brooklyn who had been missing since June, was found in a trash bag on the street. Unfortunately, attempts to find her killer haven’t been aided by the media, which has given the case scant national attention. This isn’t, however, an isolated incident. Year after year, Black people who are missing, kidnapped, or murdered fail to generate but a fraction of the public attention and outrage that is generously afforded to young White women. One of the best examples of this came in the summer of 2005, when Latoyia Figueroa, a 24-year-old pregnant mother who was reported missing, received only a fraction of the media attention given to Natalee Holloway, who also mysteriously disappeared that Memorial Day weekend. Like the Ramsey case, the American media made racialized (and racist!) determinations about the types of people who deserve our collective consideration.

Of course, some point to the youth, beauty, and unquestioned innocence of Jonbenet Ramsey as explanations for our nation’s obsession with her case. While I don’t doubt that this is true, it is important to consider the way in which innocence is constructed along class and racial lines. As cultural critic Henry Giroux points out, the indignation surrounding the Ramsey case or the 1999 Columbine High School shootings is informed by a belief that “this shouldn’t happen here.” Within this frame, childhood innocence is viewed as a natural right that should be protected from the ever-encroaching forces of moral decline such as hip-hop music and cable television. Unfortunately, such protections are largely reserved for those who are already shielded from various forms of social misery through their privileged class positions and racial identities.

At the same time that they appeal to Jonbenet Ramsey’s lost innocence as justification for the incessant media coverage, many Americans ignore the more pervasive and pernicious social structures that strip away the innocence of millions of poor Black and Latino youth. Unfortunately, the same people who willingly endorse shortsighted policy initiatives like the “Deleting Online Predators Act” (DOPA) fail to support adequate school funding, reasonable sentencing guidelines, universal health care, or socially responsible welfare provisions. By focusing on such a sensational and unusual case, we successfully ignore the more quotidian but no less absurd forms of structural child abuse that damage ghetto youth.

Lastly, by focusing on the sensational dimensions of Ramsey’s case, such as the remarkable precision of the criminals, the curiously dark background of Karr, and Ramsey’s eerily adept performance of womanhood, we are able to construct her death as an unusual, unexpected, and unavoidable tragedy. By ascribing an aura of rarity to the case, we ignore the role that Ramsey’s family and larger corporate culture played in her tragic death.

Despite the country’s renewed interest in the Ramsey case, little mention has been made about the complex of media forces that enable the sexualization and objectification of female bodies at increasingly younger ages. Instead of critiquing the nonstop barrage of music videos, magazines, and television shows like America’s Top Model, we focus on the singular pathologies of John Mark Karr. From this posture, media pundits can hypocritically scoff at Karr’s sickness at the same time that they reduce Jonbenet to a pre-pubescent nymphet by repeatedly replaying her highly sexualized video footage. Ironically, it is this practice that may have produced the very desires that prompted Karr to offer his false confession.

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