Race and reporting: are we backsliding?
UPDATE: The Citizen has edited the online version of this story (haven’t seen a print copy) to just use ‘black’ and ‘white’. CBC has removed all references to race but notes that the victim shouted racial epithets at his killer.
Two media outlets reporting a verdict in a trial. Some guys get drunk and pick a fight with some other guys, complete with baseball bats. There’s a tussle and one of the picked-on guys grabs a bat from his tormentors.
One guy – even after his friends run away – yells insults at the now bat possessing guys. And he gets hit in the head.
He has weak arteries in his brain, goes down like a ton of bricks and – while he lives for another day – never gets up again. The guy who hit drunk, weak-veined guy is charged with manslaughter.
Now, check out the reporting:
Here’s the CBC: Man pleads guilty in baseball bat slaying. And here’s the Citizen: Man pleads guilty to manslaughter in McCarthy Road beating death.
CBC mentions that the group of guys with whom the victim picked a fight were Somali. The Citizen says they were ‘black’, but calls the victim a ‘Caucasian’ (upper case C and everything). CBC doesn’t mention what race or ethnicity the victim was.
I don’t much care about the verdict. But the way the journos trip on the race issue is crazy making. The CP Style Guide says you only report ‘race’ (whatever that is) when it’s germane to the story. Was it germane? Probably.
The white guys were yapping about how they figured Somalis were to blame for recent mugging and vandalism incidents. They went over to the gas station where they knew some Somali men were hanging out to pick a fight. But there was nothing to connect the men they confronted to anything. The Somalis were merely committing the sin of “Being Black”. Or in CP style, ‘black’.
So then the question remains about what words to use.
CBC only mentions the race of the accused and his friends. The victim and his friends have no ethnicity, it seems. CBC feeds the racist notion that Somali equals trouble by not mentioning the original antagonists’ “race”.
I’m not sure which is worse – that or identifying the victim using the archaic, pseudo-scientific term ‘caucasian’. Did Moe Dinelle really come from the Caucasus?
Is it so hard for white journalists to use that term? They throw ‘black’ around every time there’s a crime short to be written, but can’t bring themselves to say ‘white’.
The two terms are useless constructs, so dispense with both or use them both. Using one but not the other smacks of bias. And if you’re going to use them both, use parallel terms.
