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Last week I wrote about the NYT’s coverage of the Minneapolis school shooting, where the headline and article repeatedly used “Ms.” and “her” for the shooter, Robin Westman. That may follow their style guide, but in the context of a mass killing, it reads less like neutral reporting and more like ideological signaling. The pronouns end up being the story, while two murdered children fade into the background.
Now there’s the coverage of the truly awful video released of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee stabbed to death on a Charlotte train. There are familiar editorial fingerprints from the ‘style guide’. The NYT capitalizes “Black” but leaves “white” lowercase. Elon Musk pointed this out and it’s getting traction. This is a policy shift the NYT, AP, and others made in 2020 after George Floyd’s killing, with the reasoning that “Black” marks shared cultural identity, while capitalizing “White” risks feeding white-identity politics.
That may be defensible as a policy, but applied in a case where a Black suspect kills a white victim, it lands as bias whether intended or not. The style guide twice now ends up louder than the tragedy itself.
When editorial rules like these are applied without reflection, they pull focus from the human story. It truly makes me upset because these were horrific events. There’s no reason to show off your liberal bona fides at all. Just show compassion for the victims and don’t preemptively build up scaffolding for when it will be used as culture war fuel.
Frankly, I think that articles like this make race relations in America worse. I don’t think that the killing has anything to do with race, at all. It’s about violence in America, which is so insanely out of control. I think cloaking it in platitudes about decreasing crime rate stats also shows how scared of second-order effects news organizations are.
I read a book recently about the history of imprisonment in Texas. It talks about restorative justice and prison labor etc. I don’t know what else you’re supposed to do besides reassure the public that this man (or anyone inflicting evil on others) will never see the light of day again
The assailant is on tape saying "I got that white girl, I got that white girl" as he walks off the train after the attack. Maybe he was mentally ill, maybe he was motivated by racial animus, or maybe it was a bit of both? Perhaps interviews with the assailant will reveal more, but right now Trump and the FBI are really trying to downplay the racial angle and make it about cash-free bail and repeat violent offenders. They got to a federal death penalty charge via transit terrorism, which seems like a bit of a stretch.
From a broader perspective, this incident has highlighted some awkward realities of inter-ethnic crime rates that have largely been banished from mainstream discourse. Twitter is no longer a representative sample of mainstream opinion... but it's the now the incubation chamber for right-wing messaging, and the Overton window there has significantly shifted in the last few days. The video is really powerful, I would put it above the George Floyd footage in terms of emotional impact. Or course it won't have the same amplification, given how national media coverage appears to be grudging at best. The NYT article on the topic is absolutely ridiculous - they try to equate honest reporting on a serious crime to fabricated reports of crimes leading to a riot in the 1800s:
I saw that line too and I don’t deny it complicates things. It could point to racial animus, or it could just be the ravings of someone severely mentally ill who latched onto the most obvious descriptor in the moment. Either way it’s very distasteful to see people scoff this off like a manufactured right wing story when a refugee was brutally murdered on a train.
The full video is miserable to watch—this young woman grasping at her throat, terrified, and then collapsing into a pool of blood. It’s one of the most viscerally awful things I’ve seen online, and it should have been covered as such: a shocking act of violence against someone who came here seeking safety.
Old white man shoots young black guy, it's assumed to be racial animus. Black guy stabs white refugee, possibly not animus. Black guy shoots white family, supposedly not animus. Black guy shoots white kid, supposedly not animus.
It doesn't take Golf Course Guy to notice a particular degree of deliberate blinkering and incredible assumptions of charity in the mainstream regarding what is allowed to be called animus.
Only in one direction is there a grisly history of racially-motivated lynchings. I would rather the press not ascribe racial motives to anybody without ironclad evidence, but it doesn't seem odd or irrational to me that white-on-black killings should be more readily assumed to be racist.
That's completely ahistorical and the perception thereof is the result of media and prosecutorial bias on the topic.
There's an order of magnitude or two fewer such events than the reverse, so they're more likely to be racist? That's a bold argument.
What's your claim, here? That lynchings weren't a thing? Or that there is some equally-widespread history of black-on-whites lynching that has been suppressed? When? Where? (And don't say South Africa or something. I mean where in America, which is what we're talking about here.)
That "so" is a strawman. My argument is a Bayesian one. What I said is: there is plenty of long-standing precedent for American whites killing American blacks for specifically racist reasons, but not much for American blacks killing American whites for the same; therefore, when dealing with any individual murder, it is prima facie more likely to be racism-based if it's white-on-black than if it's black-on-white.
The modern-day balance of one type of crime versus the other is an entirely different factor, which may or may not alter one's weighting of the historical precedent. Though I think the balance is confounded by so many things that it doesn't tell you much about motives. For example, I'm fairly sure black-on-black crime also dwarfs white-on-black crime, so the facts would be perfectly consistent with the view that blacks are more likely to commit violent crime whatever the victims' race, with the whiteness of some percentage of victims being incidental.
My claim is that this is "mostly peaceful protests" all over again and you're special-pleading that for ideological reasons, a subset of murders that are Officially Expert-Guaranteed Biased are substantially and meaningfully worse than murders that are probably but not officially biased.
Were the Zebra Murders lynchings, or not? If not, what exactly is that word doing in your complaint except to gerrymander and blinker the meaningfulness of certain murders above others?
I disagree, in the same way I am generally disinterested in the debate around fascism versus authoritarianism. Murder is murder. Mass murder is mass murder. Authoritarianism is authoritarianism. Gerrymandering the border to forgive one's own totalitarian or otherwise bigoted impulse while attacking another is not useful.
Not since the 1930s. First few years of the graph are also interesting.
I don't particularly feel like digging up the graphs for black-on-white murders, but your perception is downstream of this invention of a special category of murder, just like the power+prejudice definition of racism was created so that racism couldn't be committed against certain people.
You have zero proof for this.
Again, a bold strategy filled with assumptions. If Bayesianism brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
The defining characteristics of lynchings is that they had social approval. Where there were lynchings, there was, by definition, a critical mass of the local white population who was at best unwilling to interfere with racist murders. Therefore, the existence of lynchings raises the likelihood for any one white local being racist and potentially murderous much more than the existence of lone racist killers does. How relevant the bigoted opinions of people three or four generations back still are today is a different question, but I maintain that "lynching" is a meaningful category with salient characteristics that set it apart from other racially-motivated hate crimes.
I mean, my assumption is that race matters a lot less than people say it does, and I'd like to go back to a more race-blind form of public discourse. This is, I fee it is worth pointing out, pretty far the mainstream press's position. It is worth distinguishing again between what I think, and what I think of what Blue journalists think. My position is that if you're going to try to pattern-match racial dynamics onto individual murders it's not prima facie absurd or disingenuous to assume white-on-black attacks are more likely the product of racism; but also I think you mostly shouldn't try to look at random killings as having anything to do with racism unless the facts of the case specifically support it.
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