5 dead at sea gripped the world. Hundreds of others shrugged.

On one ship, five people died on a very expensive excursion that was supposed to return them to the lives they knew. On the other hand, perhaps as many as 500 people died just days earlier on a sordid and dangerous journey, fleeing poverty and violence in search of a new life.

After losing contact with the five in a submarine descending towards the Titanic, multiple countries and private entities sent ships, planes and underwater drones to pursue a vague hope of rescue. That was far more effort than was made on behalf of the hundreds aboard a dangerously overcrowded, disabled fishing boat off the Greek coast when there were still ample chances of rescue.

And it was the lost submarine, the Titan, that attracted huge attention from news organizations around the world and their audiences, much more so than the boat that sank in the Mediterranean Sea and the failure of the Greek Coast Guard to help before it capsized.

The underwater accident, at the site of a shipwreck that has fascinated the public for more than a century, would be captivating either way. But it happened right after the tragedy in the Mediterranean, and the contrast between the two disasters and the way they were handled has sparked a debate around the world in which some see the harsh realities of class and ethnicity.

On board the Titan were three wealthy businessmen — a white American, a white Briton and a Pakistani-British billionaire — 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 estimate, with barely 100 survivors — were migrants, mostly from South Asia and the Middle East, trying to reach Europe.

“We’ve seen how some lives are valued and others are not,” Judith Sunderland, acting deputy director for Europe at the Human Rights Watch group, said in an interview. And looking at the treatment of migrants, she added: “We can’t help but talk about racism and xenophobia.”

Bee a forum in Athens on Thursdayweighed in on former President Barack Obama and said of the submarine, “the fact that that’s gotten so much more attention than 700 people that sank, that’s an unsustainable situation.”

Status and race undoubtedly play a role in how the world responds to disasters, but there are other factors as well.

Other stories have been followed in minute detail by millions of people, even when the people involved weren’t rich or white, like the boys trapped deep in a flooded cave in Thailand in 2018. one of a kind and brought days of tension as few people knew about the migrants until they died.

And study after study, people show more compassion for the individual victim seen in minute detail than for a seemingly anonymous mass of people.

But the disparity in apparent concern for the migrants versus the underwater passengers provoked an unusually caustic response in online essays, social media posts and article comments.

Laleh Khalili, a professor who has taught international politics and the Middle East at several British universities, wrote on Twitter that she felt sorry for the 19-year-old, but that “a libertarian billionaire ethos of ‘we are above all laws, including physics’ brought down the Titan. And the unequal treatment of this and the catastrophe of the migrant boat is unspeakable.”

Many commentators said they couldn’t worry—some even expressed grim satisfaction—about the fate of people on the submarine who could afford to pay $250,000 each for a thrill. Before the US Coast Guard said on Thursday that the ship had imploded and the five were dead, jokes and the phrase “eat the rich” spread online.

That glee partly reflects growing anger in recent years about economic inequality, about the wealthy themselves, and about the growing realization that the economy only works for those at the top, says Jessica Gall Myrick, a communications professor at Pennsylvania State University whose specialty is the psychology of how people use media.

“One of the functions of humor is that it helps us socialize with people, so people who laugh at your joke are on your team and those who don’t are not on your team,” she said in an interview . Expressions of anger, she said, can serve the same purpose.

Human rights advocates are directing their anger not at the wealthy, but at European governments whose attitudes towards migrants have hardened, which not only do little to help those in trouble at sea, but also actively reject them, even treating civilians as criminals trying to rescue migrants.

“I can see why the submarine has attracted attention: it’s exciting, unprecedented, clearly linked to the most famous shipwreck in history,” said Ms Sunderland of Human Rights Watch. “I don’t think it was wrong to do everything possible to save them. What I wish is that no effort be spared to save the black and brown people who are drowning in the Mediterranean. Instead, European states are doing everything they can to prevent rescue.”

The rift between the two tragedies was particularly noted in Pakistan, home to many of those who died on the fishing boat, and Shahzada Dawood, the tycoon aboard the Titan. It highlighted Pakistan’s extreme divide between the millions living in poverty and the ultra-rich, and the failure of multiple governments over many years to address unemployment, inflation and other economic woes.

“How can we complain about the Greek government? Our own government in Pakistan has not stopped the agents from playing with the lives of our youths by enticing them to travel such dangerous routes,” said Muhammad Ayub, a farmer in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, whose younger brother fishing vessel that capsized and is believed to have died.

One factor that made the two maritime disasters very different is the degree of familiarity – although that in no way explains the lack of effort to help the migrants before their boat sank. It’s not just that some people are indifferent to the suffering of migrants – it’s also that migrants drowning in the Mediterranean are tragically common.

The rescue of a few people in Turkey who had survived for more than a week under the rubble of a powerful earthquake in February – unusual victories amid an unusual disaster – drew global attention rarely given to the millions of refugees from the Syrian civil war those , have been living not far away for ten years.

In 2013, the deaths of more than 300 migrants in another boat disaster off the Italian island of Lampedusa sparked a wave of concern and increased rescue patrols. When Syrian asylum seekers tried to reach Europe en masse in 2015, some governments and people portrayed them as strange, unwanted, even dangerous, but there was also a lot of interest and empathy. The shocking image of a drowned 3-year-old washing up on a beach in particular had a profound effect.

Years and countless migrant boat disasters later, the deaths are no less horrific, but attract far less attention. Practitioners call it “compassion fatigue.” The political will to help, always spotty and precarious, has diminished with it.

“Nobody cared about the hundreds of people” who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, said Arshad Khan, a political science student at the University of Karachi. “But,” he added, “the United States, the United Kingdom and all the world powers are busy finding the billionaire businessman who spent billions of rupees to view the wreck of the Titanic in the sea.”

Reporting contributed by Christina Goldbaum from London and Zia ur-Rehman from Karachi, Pakistan.