Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees, possibly because your giant racist head is blocking the view of the forest.

Michelle Weber,

Americans, demand better of your media.

Here is an actual thing that an actual person said on television today, in reference to the Charlie Hebdo attack:

Bream wondered how police would be able to identify “bad guys” if they had ski masks and couldn’t “even know what color,” what “the tone of their skin was?”

Her comment was a response to co-host Kennedy Montgomery’s statement that “sometimes bad guys don’t look like bad guys.”

“That’s my question about these guys because if we know they were speaking unaccented French and they had, you know, ski masks on, do we even know what color they were? What the tone of their skin was. I mean what if they didn’t look like typical bad guys?”

I do not have any particular expertise in law enforcement or crisis response, so I hope I am not speaking out of turn when I respectfully suggest that perhaps a person’s skin tone is a less significant signal of potential badness than his or her GUN AND SKI MASK.

Goddamn it. That made me yell, and now I look like a frothy liberal. Which I am, but that does not undermine the central point: if you must be explicitly racist on television, at least try to be a smart racist, insofar as such a thing is possible.

14 Comments

  1. Unbelievable. You can’t expect anything better from those who have a dogmatic, limited view of the world. These people are actually, in this respect, not different from the so-called bad guys.
    Thanks. Liked your post.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  2. An Indian friend of mine, was once ‘randomly’ spot-checked at an airport in the US, when he was travelling with a colleague (a white man), shortly after 9-11. Do ‘bad people’ only come in certain colours? Like only the blue Smarties are bad for you?!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  5. One day a few years ago a black friend of mine said he needed a white guy. We went to a Subway and he wanted me to tell the owner that my friend was a veteran, With a very cross look and producing our cards he had to honor the free meal. The owner was Muslim. That racism issue is prevalent between many and against many.

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  7. Ugh. UGH. UGGGGGHHHHH. You see that? I have turned into a caveman. They have turned me into a caveman. Seriously, who says that stuff? I used to think racism wasn’t a thing that still happened, but APPARENTLY IT IS.

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