It's a common but I think unhelpful observation that americans make racism worse by focusing on race more. I see it often in the comments here, people saying things like "why make it about race" or "we should ignore everyone's race."
The thing is it was already about race. Even if that cop disappeared those men for completely non-racist reasons (and we pretend their motivation is even knowable in that way), the racial history of american policing is such that it's part of the story anyway.
A black person reading the race-sanitized headline is going to immediately think "yeah and I bet I can guess their skin colors too" and on looking into it find out they were right and come to conclusion it was obscured out of intentional complicity.
There is no race-neutral way to report on or discuss many things in an american context because those things are not race-neutral. We can certainly wish it were otherwise, but when we try to enforce that fictional neutrality we both obscure and create other problems.
The capitalization thing is just part of an ongoing and unsettled reevaluation of what "races" even are, what their boundaries and prerogatives are, how they refer to themselves and how they are to be referred to, etc. I respect your discomfort with it and would point out that probably very few people are happy with the current state of this nomenclature, but that it's almost completely irrelevant to the problems themselves.
> A black person reading the race-sanitized headline is going to immediately think "yeah and I bet I can guess their skin colors too" and on looking into it find out they were right and come to conclusion it was obscured out of intentional complicity.
This works the other way too. People see an article about a crime that doesn't mention race and they'll go out of their way to track one down that does to confirm their bias that certain people are criminals. There's no reason for that though. Either way it's a very unhealthy way to view the world and worse it's entirely one sided. You don't see headlines like: "Black man pulled over by White cop, has friendly interaction, let off with a warning"
The media knows that fear and outrage generate views and ad impressions and that's what they push at us while we wonder why everyone is so fearful and angry all the time. It's not healthy. The news should report race in headlines where it's actually relevant to the situation and provide details and historical context in the text of articles. It does little good to stoke outrage and confirm bias at a glance.
>It's a common but I think unhelpful observation that americans make racism worse by focusing on race more.
Common, unhelpful, and selective. The whole idea of "race" is arbitrary and meaningless. Ask someone to come up with a specific definition of who qualifies as a member of what "race", and they won't be able to, because it doesn't exist. Obviously we are saddled with the barbaric vestiges of the past, but that doesn't mean that we are forced to carry them on, codify them, and pretend like they have any sort of objective meaning. All the identify fetishists, racialists, and those who insist on codifying the nonsensical racial nonsense from the past are part of the problem, do a disservice to society and prevent us from moving forward.
The most unhelpful opinion is "pretend history doesn't exist and pretend people formed their opinions from the collective worldwide knowledge of when I made this comment". It is of no use in the actual world that exist and just is an idealized version of what people who haven't experienced the problems wish to be true.
My real life experience is that people who benefited directly or indirectly from racism and inequalities from the past, want people to not question their status and would rather pretend that living memory is something that was fake.
Edit: Petrov, your entire post history seems to be riddled with whataboutism and seemingly bad faith arguments
Race is arbitrary but that doesn't mean racism is imaginary? Arbitrary things can have profound material effects on our lives, racism is actually a powerful example of this.
> It's a common but I think unhelpful observation that americans make racism worse by focusing on race more. I see it often in the comments here, people saying things like "why make it about race" or "we should ignore everyone's race."
> The thing is it was already about race. Even if that cop disappeared those men for completely non-racist reasons (and we pretend their motivation is even knowable in that way), the racial history of american policing is such that it's part of the story anyway.
> A black person reading the race-sanitized headline is going to immediately think "yeah and I bet I can guess their skin colors too" and on looking into it find out they were right and come to conclusion it was obscured out of intentional complicity.
> There is no race-neutral way to report on or discuss many things in an american context because those things are not race-neutral. We can certainly wish it were otherwise, but when we try to enforce that fictional neutrality we both obscure and create other problems.
Unfortunately, that's the entire point; it's not a coincidence that questioning "why make it about race?" is overwhelmingly from people who benefit from the history you mention. It's just another form of the same cognitive dissonance of that much-overused but often apt Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Class war disguised as a culture war. The old gits still play the same games.
And no I don’t care about ageism; not when the elders hid climate change from the young.
Tacit ageism against next generations constantly wrapped up in equivocation and appeals to authority embedded in long dead mens political documents.
Generational churn of post war shell shocked paranoids that went stupid drinking lead, huffed leaded gas and other crap before bans on industrial messes needs to go faster
The thing is it was already about race. Even if that cop disappeared those men for completely non-racist reasons (and we pretend their motivation is even knowable in that way), the racial history of american policing is such that it's part of the story anyway.
A black person reading the race-sanitized headline is going to immediately think "yeah and I bet I can guess their skin colors too" and on looking into it find out they were right and come to conclusion it was obscured out of intentional complicity.
There is no race-neutral way to report on or discuss many things in an american context because those things are not race-neutral. We can certainly wish it were otherwise, but when we try to enforce that fictional neutrality we both obscure and create other problems.
The capitalization thing is just part of an ongoing and unsettled reevaluation of what "races" even are, what their boundaries and prerogatives are, how they refer to themselves and how they are to be referred to, etc. I respect your discomfort with it and would point out that probably very few people are happy with the current state of this nomenclature, but that it's almost completely irrelevant to the problems themselves.