It is a truth universally unacknowledged that not all lives are equal — or perhaps, not all lives are mourned equally. This tacit, if not secret understanding, governs our political theatre. “Have you ever seen news media circulate images of a white person’s corpse?” asked the ever prescient Viceland Director of Development Ayesha Siddiqi on Twitter on August 27, 2015. The answer is no, or rarely — depending on one’s access to the world. To the inverse of the question, the answer is yes. Every day since — and perhaps, every day hence.

On November 24, more than two dozen extremists carried out the deadliest attack in modern Egyptian history. They exploded bombs inside a Sufi mosque, shot at worshippers as they fled, killing more than 300 and injured dozens more in Bir al-Abed. As the New Yorker, pointed out, this is one of almost 1,700 attacks the country has witnessed over four years (while referring to this as one of several ‘challenges’ facing President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi).

Almost all coverage of the attack lingered on the sanguineous — blood-stained floors, bodies unceremoniously laid in rows, charred husks of cars, etc. Even the New Yorker story, which was on the political impact of the attack, opens with a heap of shoes belonging to the dead. The refugee crisis and the war in Syria, both of which had been covered extensively and were key election points for the Western world took on the air of tragedy once newspapers and social media were flooded with images of viscera and gore, of kurta-clad bodies strewn about in rubble. The six-year-long Syrian conflict coalesced around the drowned body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi.

Once again, the bodies of the brown dead serve only to score points among a quibbling voter base. Little wonder then that US President Donald Trump’s response to the attack was to bring the focus to American shores and that infernal wall.

The 2015 bombing in Beirut was followed a day later by an attack in Paris. The coverage of Beirut saw several headlines reductively referring to the city as a “Hezbollah stronghold”. Paris, meanwhile, was described as a site of carnage, a massacre — as Nadine Akaka observed, prioritising the civilian nature of the area over its ethno-religious make-up. Unsurprisingly, monuments across the world were lit in the French tricolour, tears were shed, speeches were made, and vengeance was sought. Beirut? As far as international media and support was concerned, it was a typically unfortunate day, not akin to the coverage we’re seeing about Egypt (and Kabul before that, and Dhaka before that, Lahore before, Mogadishu, etc.).

It isn’t simply that “coverage of terrorist attacks is massively biased,” but the nature of that coverage which also presents a problem. The Middle East and South East Asia are rarely depicted with quiet dignity as befitting any people in the midst of incalculable loss, instead what is constantly thrust before us, on constant loop, is carnage. Nowhere is this juxtaposition more revealed than in last year’s New York Times’ well-meaning if not uncharitably titled Anne Frank Today Is a Syrian Girl. By presenting brown bodies explicitly as the sites of violence, it dehumanises them while normalising the violence. The distinction between victims and survivors. “This is what they do,” “this is their life” muttered around many a Thanksgiving table.

That violence is expected is all the more apparent when I login to Facebook. There is no option to change my profile to a flag to any of these places. That Facebook has instituted a ‘I’m safe’ feature in the event of catastrophe or tragedy is telling of the performativity of grief and which lives are mourned. There is no Je Suising for the people who’ve died there. Google autofills baguette if you type Je suis Ba.

I must confess, Je ne suis pas Charlie Hebdo. My feelings about the magazine do not mean I am incapable of empathy and support. But I cannot claim to ‘be’ Charlie Hebdo, after all if their content, views and beliefs are anything to go by, Charlie Hebdo n’est pas moi. And yet, to mourn the death of those who would never mourn mine is the compact that governs media coverage today.

Suffering is competitive enough, grief should not be. By denying the visibility of grief, of solidarity, of humanity, the message is that you and I are presumed to inhabit, a different, atavistic world; divided into lives that are mournable, and lives that serve to mourn.

There is very little display of mourning. Mourning at its core is an acknowledgment of Loss. The kind where the world is different for having a you-shaped hole in it. As opposed to loss, with the finality of change falling through a sewer grate. Our empathy for your tragedy is a given, even demanded. Yours is non-existent. Obama declared the attack on Paris, an “attack on humanity”. US drone strikes have killed up to 216 civilians last year alone. Nongovernmental research organisations place the numbers at twice that. Neither do those dead nor the ones in Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh, Iraq and Yemen seem to constitute humanity, i.e. no great loss has occurred. The International Business Times has thoughtfully embedded the footage of a drone strike in their story on civilian casualties in Syria. The deaths of 86 Syrians can be viewed on loop in glorious high definition.

One can argue that statistically alone, there are more corpses of colour in the media simply because black and brown bodies are subject to a greater degree of violence. But that does not explain the absence of white bodies in the media. Older and wearier ones amongst us remember the 2004 images of sanitised American-flag draped coffins from the Afghan front which all but threatened to shift the course of the war. Images of corpses may be dehumanising, but if you were never fully human to begin with, it does little. This then leaves us with a choice, to demand to be recognised as human, or to have our lives be made visible. To have our story told is to agree to its spectacle.