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Edit: Arab Islamic -> Arab/Black Islamic, per comment
Will the world ever move toward a new naming scheme for individuals? What might that new scheme look like?
WSJ reports:
(Emphasis mine)
Whenever anti-Semitic attacks take place in the US, it seems like there are essentially two possibilities, either the attacker is Arab/Black Islamic or white far-right, and his name often makes it obvious which category it is. The clarifying effect also applies to mass shootings--white sounding names evoke one conclusion, Black or Asian another, and a female name the most shocking of all.
I think the usefulness of names is broadly a benefit for helping readers make sense of the world, but this likely goes against the wishes of the median media class, who would decry any such pattern recognition as racist or perhaps sometimes sexist. The media seems to tilt the scales sometimes by varying the publicity level of photographs--displaying it more prominent when the identity of alleged perpetrator goes with the narrative and vice versa. But there isn't much that can be done with the name, at least not yet. I can see a future where names of perpetrators are suppressed too, perhaps using the pretext of not wanting to glorify mass shooters in that specific scenario, but perhaps sometimes meant to reduce supposed stereotyping.
This led me to wonder if by the year 3000 we'll still be trudging around with [FNAME] [LNAME]. We've been doing that for thousands of years already, but perhaps technology will make it such that a future digital handle becomes more uniquely identifying, and eventually supplant the current format.
For example, imagine a unique identifier formatted as such:
Chad-2980USMWA-Washington
The middle name incorporates the subject's birth year, country of birth, sex, race, and vocational bucket as envisioned by the parents (think nominative determinism--it's never for sure, but has some signifying value).
I imagine much better schemes exist. Surely the prevailing format of today is archaic and suboptimal for a futuristic world!
The 3rd possibility is that it's a hoax carried out by a member of the Jewish community.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/us/jcc-bomb-threats.html
I've never heard of a hate crime hoax that was meant to implicate a minority. I've also never heard of a hate crime hoax meant to implicate a specific person at all, because that's legally dangerous.
(And to avoid some obvious replies, I mean central examples in a modern American context, no fair saying that there was a 1950's lynching that falsely accused a black person of hating whites, or Jews versus Arabs in Israel, etc..)
If we're including threats sent by people attempting to be anonymous, back in 2014 one of the two threats that got Anita Sarkeesian to cancel her USU speech unless they agreed to forbid guns on-campus while she was there (which they legally couldn't do) was false-flagging as MrRepzion, a youtuber who had recently made a pro-gamergate video. The email itself came out in the FOIA release, page 16 and 78 with slightly different redactions, his name is redacted but the release provides enough information to confirm that he was the one mentioned:
Sarkeesian mentioned the threat and that it claimed to be from gamergate, but not that it also claimed to be from MrRepzion:
Unlike the other email none of the text was released or quoted by media outlets except for the word "gamergate". (Even after the FOIA release in 2016 I remember seeing articles mention the USU threats but none mention the MrRepzion part or otherwise take information from the release.)
Washington Post: ‘Gamergate’: Feminist video game critic Anita Sarkeesian cancels Utah lecture after threat
The FBI did end up knocking on MrRepzion's door and asking him about it 10 months later, he tweeted and made a video about it. This then matches up with the date that the FOIA release mentions:
And the details of the interview mentioned on page 33:
The actual sender was never found, sending emails anonymously is trivial. Sending phone-calls anonymously is less trivial but I think it's still possible, so apparently the Jewish bomb threat guy messed it up somehow. Anyway I mostly just bring this up because I think it's an interesting part of culture-war history that people should know about, but to bring it back to your post I think once someone is trying to send illegal threats anonymously he's relying on not getting caught rather than avoiding additional illegality.
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