The Media’s Color-Coded Parenting Standard: White parents of school shooters are culpable; black parents of inner-city gangbangers are blameless.

On April 19, 2021, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski suggested in a text to Chicago’s mayor that the parents of two children recently killed in Chicago’s gang activity had “failed those kids.” Kempczinski’s text became public in November 2021, prompting widespread accusations of racism and calls for his resignation. Kempczinski confessed to his white privilege and apologized profusely for holding parents responsible for the fate of their children.

On December 3, a district attorney in Michigan filed involuntary manslaughter charges against the parents of Ethan Crumbley. The 15-year-old Crumbley allegedly killed four fellow students during a shooting rampage at his Oxford, Michigan high school on November 30. The prosecutor based her indictment of Crumbley’s parents on the fact that they had allowed Ethan to access a legally purchased handgun and ought to have known that the boy was primed to kill his classmates. The press, Democratic politicians, and gun control advocates greeted the homicide charges against the Crumbley parents with ecstatic approbation.

The divergent reactions to the Kempczinski text message and the Crumbleys’ indictment illuminate the different standards to which minority parents and white parents are held. When black juveniles perpetrate street violence, the press and public officials almost never ask: where were the parents? The less involved a parent is in a child’s life, the less society expects of him. These double standards may have a benign intent, but they enable a cultural dysfunction whose effects are thousands of times more lethal than school shootings.

Kempczinski made his ill-fated suggestion of parental responsibility after seven-year-old Jaslyn Adams was gunned down by her father’s gang rivals. Jaslyn and her father Jontae Adams were parked in a McDonald’s drive-thru lane on Chicago’s West Side on April 18, 2021, when two gunmen jumped out of a car and unleashed at least 45 shots at their car. Jaslyn was struck six times and died; Jontae was seriously wounded. A convicted heroin dealer, Jontae knew that his gang’s enemies were out for his blood. The day before the shooting, he tweeted: “Opps probably downstairs waiting on me.”

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Kempczinski would pay the price for saying the unsayable. After activists obtained and released the text message in November, a coalition including Color of Change and Showing Up for Racial Justice released an open letter to the CEO: “Your text message was ignorant, racist and unacceptable coming from anyone,” the letter read, “let alone the CEO of McDonald’s, a company that spends big money to market to communities of color and purports to stand with Black Lives.” McDonald’s employees and race advocates protested outside the company’s headquarters and demanded reparations. U.S. representative Bobby Rush joined calls for Kempczinski to resign. A McDonald’s worker told a local TV station that Kempczinski was “putting the blame on parents for the violence in the streets. He can’t relate because he is wealthy.” Jaslyn Adams’s mother, heretofore a cipher, emerged from her obscurity to vent her anger: “How dare you judge me! . . . You come from privilege. You can’t speak about me.”