Race-Baiting:

An Unethical Practice of Immoral People

News agencies are supposed to help people by discovering or exposing, and then by informing people of what they have found, but that is not what they do these days. Yes they do have some stories and articles that work for everyone and accomplish good things by informing people of things they didn’t know already. This type of reporting is what I consider to be true journalism, and in its simplest form is a simple record of dates, facts, and events as they actually happened.

Many times what you see are headlines like this however: “Experts say gun alone doesn’t justify deadly force in fatal shooting of Florida airman – A Black Air Force senior airman was killed by a Florida sheriff’s deputy.” Or you may see something like this in a URL: “/US/michigan-attorney-general-probing-death-black-man-hit/story?id=110136757“, the headline for which reads, “Michigan attorney general probing death of Black man hit by unmarked police car”.

Notice that even the “B” in “Black man” has special emphasis placed on it using capitalization, why? In the context in which the word “black” is being used here and its position the sentence, it is neither a proper noun nor does the sentence begin with the word black. Therefore, why did the author capitalize the word, and why did the editor approve it and publish it that way?

The news organizations above felt the need to point out that the victim was a black man. I have never seen the same observation when the victim of anything at all is a white man however, where a news agency points out specifically that the victim was white. This type of behavior within news organizations is repugnant, and it hurts our entire society by their doing so as it is almost a certainty that it causes adverse effects throughout our society as a result.

They [the news organizations and their reporters] do it on purpose in an industry-wide effort to generate more stories to chase down in the aftermath of what they actually caused to happen to begin with. It is like a fire department that goes around committing the crime of arson just to have fires to go extinguish, there is literally no difference between the news agency pointing out the race of a victim and a fireman who starts fires on purpose.

Both of those actions have the potential of leading to innocent people being hurt or killed, and property being destroyed out of anger as a direct result. Both of those actions are taken without any regard for the safety of anyone within our society. Only one of them is illegal however, and the one that isn’t has been known to cause far more damage than the one that is.

In the case of a news organization pointing out a victims race, it is far more dangerous because the effect that it has on our society is often so far reaching due to their powerful platform. They have such great visibility and reach that when they say something, everyone in the world potentially hears them say it. Consider that, and then consider that this power is in the hands of people who exhibit that they have no morals, no reasonable code of ethics, and what often seems like no concern for their fellow human beings, because if they had any of those virtues, they would never specifically point out the race of a victim, placing extra emphasis upon it to ensure that it is immediately noticed.

It isn’t legal to stand up in a crowded theater and yell “FIRE!” when there isn’t a fire, and I wouldn’t suggest doing so even if there was a fire, it should be handled differently if you want to save lives rather than cause people to get injured or even to die. If the “journalists” who are responsible for including this “race-baiting tactic” into their reporting or the editors who are responsible for approving this repugnant behavior, or for themselves including it for some reason, if they cared about making a positive difference in the lives of people in this country they would refrain from doing so, ever.

When you see this type of race-baiting in a news story, a headline, or a URL, always remember this, the parties responsible for including it or approving it don’t care about anyone other than themselves, because if they did, they wouldn’t have published anything about the race of the victim(s), which shouldn’t even matter at all in this country. In this country, we are all supposed to be Americans first, and our skin color is not even supposed to matter.

If that is the case, then why do so many news organizations continue to make it matter? They are the ones doing so, after all. And many of them do it frequently.