When a white guy shot up massage parlors in Atlanta recently, the press made sure you knew he was white. Meanwhile, a story I ran across last week about an arrest being made for a recent attack on a Chinese immigrant doesn’t mention that accused assailant is black. I can’t say why the authors of the story, Haley Yamada and Marlene Lenthang, kept that detail from readers. But it certainly doesn’t help deal with the racial problems we have in this country when journalists ignore that white people are not the only racist people. It turns things can be handled worse that, though.
David Beard is a journalist with 62,200 followers on Twitter, who describes himself in his Twitter bio as “Writer, Executive Editor, Newsletterer @NatGeo. Alum: @WashingtonPost @AP @bostonglobe”. He wrote this tweet:
One woman is 85.
One 65.
Both are Asian American.
Both were stabbed by a white man.
#StopAAPIHate
He linked to this Washington Post story. The story doesn’t say the suspect in the incident was white or provide any detail beyond that suspect was a man. Looking around for other stories on this, I didn’t find any stating the suspect was white. Kenny Choi, a reporter for the CBS affiliate in San Francisco, KPIX, tweeted out a photo of the apparent suspect, who looks to be black.
It turns out, this isn’t the first time that David Beard has focused on whiteness in a tragic incident when it wasn’t warranted.