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Comment by raldi | Hacker News Reader

True. We don't say "gay passport" or "black diploma" or "woman's fishing license".

And yet the news reports I've heard on the shooting in Charleston kept mentioning "9 African Americans". No one calls the "white" folks (that would probably be me) "European Americans" or "Caucasian Americans" in the reports.

It's just silly.

Isn't that just presumptuous? "All black people trace their immediate ancestry (past 400 or so years) from Africa."

Nevermind that black people also come from: Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Thailand, etc.

But when say the victims of a violent crime are all white, the news don't typically say things like 'all five white victims were....' They just say all five victims were...' and whatever dependent clause.

I mean, Charleston was about race though. He was targeting black people. I don't think it applies, there.

But semantics!

Here's the difference:

> Five statistically unlikely people have been shot simultaneously

> Five statistically common people have been shot simultaneously

To say nothing of the killer's explicitly stated racial motives, historical repression, slavery, curtailing of rights, violence, et cetera. :P

See also, "man bites dog".

If the shooting had been in a predominantly non-white society, the headline could well have been what you proposed.

I understand. I also understand that most media actively try to censor race from most crime reportage. They'll say something like "two males were seen fleeing in a car at high speed after the shooting". Why even say males at this point? Just say people. So, on the one hand they avoid mentioning physical descriptors like race, or age, for most violent crimes, on others, they actively highlight physical and psychological characteristics like race and mental health, and assumed bigotry.

So it's a very uneven treatment.

Also, statistics are unhelpful here. Overall whites are a maj. in the U.S. They may or may not be in the locale where the crime happened, and minorities may or may not be a majority in the place a crime happened. So it very much depends how large you want to make this "place"

Right - it's another manifestation of the subtle and pervasive racism in our society. It/we conceptualize and talk about whites as the "normal" ones, the default, and everyone else as not-normal.

I see some fair points in here. It's possible that what I've heard was influenced by the recent findings of the shooter.

But I'm just so pissed, because in my country (Bulgaria) the roma (gypsy) population are always treated (by the media, and unfortunately a lot of people I know) as non-bulgarians, non-citizens, even non-people by some.

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