Consistency sacrificed for the sake of kowtowing

That’s Discriminatory — with a capital D.

A month ago The Associated Press edited its Stylebook to declare that the word black, “when referring to people in a racial, ethnic or cultural context,” should be capitalized in news stories. The Stylebook is almost universally followed in newsrooms. It is gospel.

John Daniszewski, AP’s vice president of standards, said at the time that this change conveys “an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa. The lowercase black is a color, not a person.”

The AP said it would decide within a month whether to also capitalize white when referring to people.

On Monday, the AP announced it would not capitalize white when referring to people.

Daniszewski’s rationale was contorted.

“We agree that white people’s skin color plays into systemic inequalities and injustices, and we want our journalism to robustly explore these problems,” he wrote in a memo to staff Monday. “But capitalizing the term white, as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs.”

Legitimacy to white supremacists? What about consistency? What about equal treatment?

The dithering and navel gazing began shortly after the death of George Floyd, a Black man, while being arrested by police. This resulted in protests and riots and the tearing down of statues and the near universal presumption of systemic racism, though evidence of this was entirely lacking.

What’s fair is fair. This decision by AP is kowtowing to the blindly stampeding herd and distorting the language in an Orwellian manner, conveying editorialization instead of fair and objective reporting.

The definition of racism is: “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.”

Marginalized?

This is tantamount to capitalizing Woman to recognize the gender’s significant contributions and hurdles, but lower casing man lest one propagates systemic and malignant masculinity.

 

Who gets to say what, wave what flag and have what mascot?

Obama radio interview

 “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

You can’t tell what is politically correct without a program, but who the hell has the program?

Several years ago I wrote an editorial for the Las Vegas newspaper excoriating the bowdlerized version of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” that was being published then, because it changed the nickname of the character Jim to “slave” instead of that racial slur used by Twain 219 times in the novel. To avoid the obvious hypocrisy I spelled out the word.

The then-publisher spiked it after the one black employee he could find said it was offensive. He didn’t edit out the “offensive” word, he spiked it. That was his privilege.

So in the same week that everyone is talking about removing “racist” symbols, such as state flags and university team mascots, following the killing of black churchgoers in South Carolina, Obama goes on the radio and uses that offensive term, while claiming that racism is in our DNA.

“And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say ‘nigger’ in public,” Obama said. “That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. We have — societies don’t overnight completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”

A black Las Vegas Councilman and UNLV-alum Ricky Barlow was on KXNT this morning. He opposed doing away the UNLV mascot known as Hey Reb, which was illustrated by the late-newspaper artist Mike Miller and sold to the school for a dollar.

Symbols and words don’t spur people to kill, being crazy does. We can’t gag everyone and prohibit ideas and debate because a few people are nuts.

Miller and mascot

The Las Vegas Sun has a story online saying Harry Reid did not call for UNLV to drop the Rebel name and mascot. Who are going to believe? Harry or your lying ears?

The R-J story has the same spokesman quoted by the Sun denying the stance confirming the position.