Eugene Kane and Maddie Kiefer

If you've ever read Eugene Kane, you had to know that this was coming.

Kane is so predictable I could have written this column for him.

Soon after my arrival in Milwaukee during the early 1980s, some locals made it a point to tell me about Whitefish Bay, a pretty ritzy suburb just outside the city limits.

With its grand mansions and stately manors, they said, it was considered the preferred location for upwardly striving residents. For many natives, their dream was to own a home there. But the locals also warned I should watch out while driving in Whitefish Bay because the cops there were known for stopping black motorists after dark.

That's why most black people called it "White Folks Bay."

Some labels die hard.

When a beautiful 15-year-old white girl dies from an apparent drug overdose in Whitefish Bay, some people set their sensitivity meters on high, looking for differences in the way such incidents get covered in a privileged suburb as opposed to Milwaukee's central city.

Once Madison Kiefer was found dead after a personal struggle with drugs, some readers were already concerned about what was to come.

"Why does the media always make a big deal out of a Caucasian who chose to live their life like such, but are always down on African-Americans?" was an e-mail comment from a black reader. "Her story is NO DIFFERENT from any other teens in college or in the world."

Another frequent comment dealt with whether the media would react the same way to a young black girl's death by overdose in any other part of Milwaukee.

Given the grief of her family and classmates, these observations about Kiefer don't come at a perfect time. But they do indicate how some people think the scales are unbalanced in how tragedy is viewed in different places.

Yes, there are bigots. There are racists.

There are people, the usual suspects, who are going to use this case to complain about racism.

Surprise, surprise.

There's a lot of dysfunction in the story of the death of Maddie Kiefer. The people involved are white. One could say that by covering the case, the media are making white people look bad.

Such a perspective is nuts.

The people involved in crime are the people involved. The people making bad choices are the people making bad choices. Their neighborhood is their neighborhood. Their skin color is their skin color. And tragedy is tragedy.

The fact is plenty of people, probably the silent majority, don't react to the victim's race when there's tragedy.

The death of Jasmine Owens comes to mind.

Expressions of compassion and outrage are colorblind in such tragic cases.

The media coverage of tragedies is not as racially slanted as Kane claims.

Give it a rest, Kane.