Stalin is infamously alleged to have said that “one death is a tragedy, a million are a statistic.” It’s not that the death of one individual matters more (or less) than the death of others, but that the mind works in ways that allow it to focus on smaller bites of information of interest while bigger bites of greater vagary go unconsidered. All of this made for an opportune cry that the worldwide fascination with the five people who died in the Titanic submersible proves how racist we are.

On one vessel, five people died on a very expensive excursion that was supposed to return them to the lives they knew. On the other, perhaps 500 people died just days earlier on a squalid and perilous voyage, fleeing poverty and violence in search of new lives.

After contact was lost with the five inside a submersible descending to the Titanic, multiple countries and private entities sent ships, planes and underwater drones to pursue a faint hope of rescue. That was far more effort than was made on behalf of the hundreds aboard a dangerously overcrowded, disabled fishing trawler off the Greek coast while there were still ample chances for rescue.

And it was the lost submersible, the Titan, that drew enormous attention from news organizations worldwide and their audiences, far more than the boat that sank in the Mediterranean and the Greek Coast Guard’s failure to help before it capsized.

Logistical issues, such as the United States Coast Guard doesn’t police the waters around Greece, aside, the point is well taken. Sure, the Somali boat was grossly overloaded, perhaps to the point that disaster was almost guaranteed, but that doesn’t change the fact that each and every life lost was just as much a valued human being as the five aboard the submersible.

But that also doesn’t mean that racism was the reason for the enormous public and media attention on the Titan while few gave any attention to the 750 people aboard the fishing boat off Greece.

Aboard the Titan were three wealthy businessmen — a white American, a white Briton and a Pakistani-British magnate — along with the billionaire’s 19-year-old son and a white French deep-sea explorer. Those on the fishing boat — as many as 750, officials have estimated, with barely 100 survivors — were migrants primarily from South Asia and the Middle East, trying to reach Europe.

“We saw how some lives are valued and some are not,” Judith Sunderland, acting deputy director for Europe at the group Human Rights Watch, said in an interview. And in looking at the treatment of migrants, she added, “We cannot avoid talking about racism and xenophobia.”

The submersible had every making of a news story. It involved the Titanic, a ship that has long held great public interest. It involved a lost submersible, an extreme rarity. It involved identifiable individuals, some of whom were extremely wealthy, a fact that cut both ways as a certain cohort on social media damned its occupants as deserving their fate or, because one was a GOP donor, was somehow karmic.

Many commenters said they could not muster concern — some even expressed a grim satisfaction — about the fates of people on the submersible who could afford to pay $250,000 apiece for a thrill. Before the U.S. Coast Guard said on Thursday that the vessel had imploded and the five were dead, jokes and the phrase “eat the rich” proliferated online.

Just as we were able to focus on the submersible because of the rarity of its occurrence and the identifiability of its occupants, so too were those who used this to raise their hatred. Why were they busy making jokes about the death of the wealthy rather than focusing their twisted passion on the lost Somali migrants? Were they racist too, but in what they would argue was in a good way?

And yet, when rare catastrophes happen to people who aren’t billionaires, we can muster the interest to put enormous resources into saving them.

Other stories have been followed in minute detail by millions of people, even when those involved were neither wealthy nor white, like the boys trapped deep in a flooded cave in Thailand in 2018. Their plight, like that of the submersible passengers, was one-of-a-kind and brought days of suspense, while few people knew of the migrants until they had died.

The media has long made the point that a story is news when it’s unusual, not because of the number of people affected. Dog bites man is not news. Man bites dog is. This isn’t because of racism or xenaphobia, but public interest. This isn’t because we don’t care about hundreds of Somalis fleeing poverty and violence, but because overloaded fishing boats of migrants fleeing poverty and violence has become so common as to no longer capture public interest.

Years and countless migrant boat calamities later, the deaths are no less appalling but attract far less attention. Aid workers call it “compassion fatigue.” The political will to help, always spotty and precarious, has waned with it.

“No one cared about the several hundred people” who drowned in the Mediterranean, said Arshad Khan, a student of political science at the University of Karachi. “But,” he added, “the United States, the United Kingdom and all the global powers are busy finding the billionaire businessman who spent billions of rupees to view the wreckage of the Titanic in the sea.”

It’s both true and false that “no one cared” about the migrants who drowned. It’s that no one knew about them. No one knew them. They were not people whose loss was a tragedy, but a statistic. It’s not racism and xenophobia, but human nature. The lives of the lost migrants were no less valuable than the lives of the five aboard the Titan, but human nature saves us from obsessing about every horror such that we would drown in the constant stream of human misery. Instead, we focus on bites of tragedy and then go back to our own lives so we, too, can survive.