Kern writes:
We do not reference race unless it is a fact that is central to telling the story.I'm afraid this all seems a little lame to me, as did the thoughts of the paper's staffers on the matter.
By all indication, these attacks were motivated by theft, not race. Further, there is no evidence to suggest that the victims were singled out because of their race. Therefore we did not include racial descriptions in our initial news reports.
There are circumstances when race may be relevant, such as describing a criminal suspect being sought by police. But this description must be accompanied by other detailed information, such as height, weight, scars, clothing, etc. By adhering to this practice, we guard against subjecting an entire group of people to suspicion because of the color of their skin.
There are at least two more plausible reasons Kern might have given as to why the Tribune does not mention the races of the thugs and their victims:
First, it'd be superfluous. There are certain crimes that one knows within a high degree of certainty when one reads about them the racial identity of the perps. If a report concerns white-collar crime or serial murder one can be fairly confident that the criminal is white. If the report is about violent gang crime, say, girls beating a victim in a MacDonald's or on a school bus, one is reasonably sure that the girls are black. Anyone who denies this simply isn't familiar with the logic of induction.
A second more plausible explanation is that the perps were in fact black, the victims were white, and newspapers feel a subliminal obligation to downplay black on white violence. I can't prove what I'm about to allege, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and speculate that were the thugs in these crimes white and the victims black the Tribune would have shown much less reticence about mentioning the races of the people involved. Indeed, if they didn't mention the races they'd have been accused of covering up an obvious instance of white racism. If a gang of whites had beaten a 68 year old black man I suspect the races of the parties would have then been "a fact central to the telling of the story."
Liberals, however, don't believe that there is any such thing as black racism, even though most of the racial animosity in this country today is directed against whites, and so when whites are victimized it simply doesn't occur to a liberal to think that race was a factor. Thus, there's a deep reluctance among liberals to call attention to black thuggery directed against whites but no corresponding reluctance to call attention to the racial nature of white aggression directed against blacks. Indeed, such crimes, on the relatively rare occasions in which they occur, often become national stories.
We have several serious social problems in this country, one of which is black violence (which stems largely from the breakdown of the black family which is largely a consequence of the Great Society welfare programs of the 60s and 70s). Pretending that race is irrelevant and sweeping it under the rug does nothing to help ameliorate the problems. The first step in any solution is clearly and definitively describing the nature of what we are up against. Violent crime in the U.S., including interracial violent crime, is largely minority generated, and we shouldn't cover it up or ignore it just because it's minorities who are doing it any more than we should cover it up if it were whites who were responsible.
Indeed, to treat people differently because of their race is the essence of what it is to be racist.