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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
How are the memes coming along? Other than the inevitable Ghiblification, I think my favorite is "I don't see race/race seeing you". Extremely poignant reminder that you may not care about the culture war, but the culture war cares about you. Or, as Zoomer Historian put it, "You are in a race war whether you know it or not."
Honorable mention to "Concealed carry!" It's very pretty, but somewhat marred by a) the fact that Iryna Zarutska was stabbed from behind with no chance to defend herself and b) the fact that if even if she had defended herself with a gun she would have just gotten Daniel Penny'd.
This is why we had segregation. Not because evil whites wanted to hoard all the magic dirt for themselves, but because they wanted the right to go about their daily lives without worrying about getting stabbed.
EDIT: "The inevitable Hollywood race swap" is great, too, since that is exactly what happened when Epic Beard Man was adapted into Bad Ass.
No, it is blatantly not.
It really is. There was a wave of black on white violence after the slaves were freed, and as a response to that, Jim Crow which was effective at its intended purpose of preventing these depradations. Jim Crow and segregation were weakened by integration and eventually repealed and replaced with the Civil Rights Act, and there was a corresponding wave of black on white violence which lasted until the tough on crime 80s. Those policies also worked, and some lingered into the 21st century when they were repealed by legislatures or subverted by activist DAs, and we're living through the third such black on white crime wave since the civil war. Hopefully we will have the correction sooner rather than later.
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. The cycles will continue until we both learn the lesson, and teach it to our children so they don't forget.
This is exactly what segregation was for, and it worked as intended.
Even under segregation black people rode the bus. A black schizophrenic standing up and knifing a white woman in front of him would be equally viable under racial segregation. I don't accept the general premise and particularly don't accept it for this example.
The best part of reality is that it doesn't need your acceptance.
At a certain point in every fundamental disagreement, one person will say "I think X is true" and the other person will say "I think X is not true," and both parties have a choice of either pressing their point, with arguments and reasons, or saying "Nuh uh, you're wrong."
If you reach the latter stage, just stop. You do not win Motte Points for having the Official Last Word. If someone asserts something you think is incorrect and you can't be bothered to continue arguing why he's wrong, the correct follow-up is not "Reality says you're wrong."
These highly emotive threads are producing highly emotional arguments and the quality of argumentation is in inverse proportion to its heat.
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