Aaron Glee, a black man, was arrested for the murder of two women: Oluwatoyin Salau, 19, a black woman, and Victoria Sims, 75, a white woman.
So far, neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post has published a story about the arrest, though I expect they’re coming soon. Not one of the online media that has covered it – USA Today, Tampa Bay Times, Fox News, New York Post, among others – has identified the suspect as black, and I wonder why. Nor do the articles identify one of the victims as white and the other as black, though photos of both are shown, and they all point out that Salau was active in Black Lives Matter protests.
On June 6, the last day she was seen alive, Salau tweeted that she “was molested in Tallahassee, Florida by a black man…” She had no problem with identifying by race a man who molested her. (We don’t yet know if the man she tweeted about was Aaron Glee.)
George Floyd was clearly identified by the media as black and Kevin Chauvin was identified in print as white. Yet, now that I think about it, I don’t recall hearing any racial slurs spoken by officer Derek Chauvin during that painful-to-watch 8-minute video of him with his foot on Floyd’s neck.
Do we simply assume that Chauvin wouldn’t have done this to a white man?
If a white man places his foot on a black man’s neck, doesn’t that act scream racism?
Probably, but consider these statistics:
“Since the beginning of 2015, officers from the Minneapolis Police Department have rendered people unconscious with neck restraints 44 times, according to an NBC News analysis of police records… The Minnesota police data showed three-fifths of those subjected to neck restraints and then rendered unconscious were black. About 30 percent were white. Two were Native Americans. Almost all are male, and three-quarters were age 40 or under.”
We don’t yet know if Chauvin had employed that form of “neck restraint” before, though from the video it seemed to me that he was familiar with this practice and had probably used it on others he arrested. But if he did employ it before, then I would want to know if he only used it on black suspects or if he used it on whites as well. However, even if he did use this dangerous technique on whites and blacks alike, that fact wouldn’t undermine the charges against him for Floyd's death.
If it’s relevant to the George Floyd case that Floyd was a black man who died from mistreatment by a white man, is it also relevant in the Aaron Glee case that the alleged killer of a black woman and a white woman is a black man? The relevance in the Floyd case could be based on an assumption that the crime is race-based in motivation. Since Glee’s alleged victims were both black and white, it’s not obvious on the face of it that there was a racial component to these murders. Also, one could argue that there is no need to identify Aaron Glee’s race in print since the stories include a photo in which it is clear that he’s a black man. But then again, did any story about George Floyd’s death published anywhere in the world just show a picture of him and not specifically mention in print that he was black?
Here's the opening line of an NYT story:
“On May 25, Minneapolis police officers arrested George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man…” The third paragraph tells us that “Mr. Chauvin, who is white, kept his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds…”
Source : https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html
When should a news organization specify the race of the alleged perpetrator and the race of the victim(s), and when, if ever, should it refrain from doing so?
