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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   42834 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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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

I feel like the gender identity of criminals is sort of a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't situation. If the NYT uses "preferred" pronouns, then we all point and scream and say they're honoring the criminal. If the NYT makes an exception to its general rules on "preferred" pronouns, then we all point and laugh and say "look, even the NYT doesn't believe that trans women are women, they revoke the status as soon as they commit a crime."

I actually like the capitalization of Black when referring to black people in America. It neatly denotes a cohesive cultural subgroup which otherwise requires a confusing counterintuitive stew of euphemisms: African American mostly worked, but it doesn't include Zohran or Elon even though they are literally from Africa and in America; American Descendants of Slavery was a little more precise, but there's obvious edge cases involving black skinned people who were never enslaved, or non-black people who were in other circumstances. Black neatly captures the group we are talking about when we are talking about them. I don't really think white either is or needs a similar group identification.

It neatly denotes a cohesive cultural subgroup which otherwise requires a confusing counterintuitive stew of euphemisms

By this argument, both capital B Black and capital W White make a lot of sense. Both are new ethnicities divorced from "Old World" roots, some by force and some by choice. Both occupy a strange checkbox of culture and ethnicity. Alas, the NYT style guide doesn't use your much stronger argument.

Black refers to all black people around the world:

Based on those discussions, we’ve decided to adopt the change and start using uppercase “Black” to describe people and cultures of African origin, both in the United States and elsewhere. We believe this style best conveys elements of shared history and identity, and reflects our goal to be respectful of all the people and communities we cover.

Emphasis mine. As far as I'm concerned this is deeply racist and, of course, quietly white supremacist (or slightly more charitable and using progressive language, their argument continues to center the experience and importance of white people behind a mask of false respect for Blackness). Black people in America, in the UK, in Africa, everywhere? Basically all the same, according to Dean Baquet and Phil Corbett.

We will retain lowercase treatment for “white.” While there is an obvious question of parallelism, there has been no comparable movement toward widespread adoption of a new style for “white,” and there is less of a sense that “white” describes a shared culture and history. Moreover, hate groups and white supremacists have long favored the uppercase style, which in itself is reason to avoid it.

White people are just too doggone diverse and unique to have a shared anything. Plus bad people used it, so it's radioactive.

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