If a potential kidnapper (and many kidnappings end up with the murder of the victim) then I want to know whether that person is black, white, latino, wearing an orange clown wig, or whatever. And I think if the paper (or whoever is reporting) wants to keep their community safe and informed then such identifying features should always be reported, when known. It's criminal to willfully keep important details from the public when reporting on such stories.

And I agree with pacatrue- if the race of an individual in a story is irrelevant, then I don't want to here about it.

If a paper (in a business article) said the CEO was black, then I'd wonder why race was even brought it. I'd also probably stop reading that paper since it's an irrelevant detail within the context of that story. Not only would I wonder if there was a racist slant in the story, but since there was a question on judgement on the part of the reporter, I'd also wonder what pertinent business details were left out of the story.

I agree with SD- always mention race in these cases.

The student described the attacker this way: An African American male wearing a black tee-shirt and blue jeans. The student said the man who attacked him is 5'11 to 6'0 feet tall, between 35 and 40 years old, weighs 160 to 175 pounds and has black hair. The student said he saw the man driving a black four-door Cadillac from the model years 1991 to 1995.

We provided this information to all of the media last night.

Thanks to everyone for your help, and hopefully we can catch this guy.

Terry Abbott
Press Secretary
Houston Independent School District

—–

Somewhere between all those comments and emails, and contact from HISD's Press Secretary, one might think they'd have corrected that dropped sentence. But nope.

Still, thinking about the issue cleared out a few cobwebbs, I think.

I'm not saying that the issue in general isn't worth raising, and clearly, if the Chronicle has a policy on it, there's something to discuss. But I just thought I'd suggest the possibility that there isn't some underlying nefarious purpose here.

A bit o/t but (to me) related is the practice of demonstrating lack of bias in the media by having two people spout off opposing, but equally biased views. A litle judgment is needed there, as well.

When someone is arrested, the race of the person arrested in automatically entered into the system (but surprisingly, the ethnicity is not). why should the newspaper not report something that will be part of a government record.

My point is that blanket rules of “always mention race or never mention race” are always going to be in error. What's instead needed is judgment about the relevance of race to the matter being reported. I would hazard the guess that the reason rules like the Chronicle's come about is because people have often had a tendency to perceive race as relevant when it is not.

Then I think that it would be more useful to use SDs suggestion of ALWAYS mentioning the race of a perp, be it black, white, asian, latino or Tom Cruise.

As for the general policy, it's not clearly an issue of being PC or not. If race is witheld so that people aren't made to feel bad, then it can be labeled PC. However, I suspect that race has historically been provided as relevant information in a large number of cases in which it wasn't. To take marlowecan's example, I can imagine race being supplied in black on white crime, but perhaps not in white on black or black on black. And so editors come up with a blanket rule to not mention it.

The question has come up before, many times. This link is to the Reader Rep page, where the Chronicle basically defends the policy. You'll see from the comments thread that there's a lot of disagreement. (And the comments on the story I linked in the post, though, are very heated.) (h/t for the RR link to Marc)

I've written, actually, to both the Chronicle reporter and the Metro editor, about this story. No response as yet.

The PC newspaper usually use the excuse that race is not pertinent. A better way to deal with the problem is to always mention the race instead of selectively doing it.

The Black community felt banning reporting race in crime stories was hiding a problem that the community knew was there…but that they felt Whites in the burbs preferred to pretend didn't exist (so no need to fund social programs, education etc.). Despite the ban, when there were Black on White crimes…eventually the stories hit the front pages.

We aren't a post-racial society by a long-shot I am afraid.

This is a debate that has been ongoing since the PC years of the 1990s.

In my city, I remember arguments about this in re. the city's major newspaper's policy of never reporting alleged perps race in crime stories. The argument the newspaper made was that these descriptions usually never helped capture criminals. (Of course, the was the strange contradiction that clothing could be described, and facial marks, but never the race.)

This policy ended several years ago after…interestingly enough…complaints from the city's African American community leaders. They pointed out the fact that most crimes involving African Americans were Black on Black. They argued that the media only publicized crimes with African Americans when Whites were the victims.

My girlfriend at the time was Black, and she was particularly vehement on this subject. She believed, correctly I think, that White media has little interest in the Black community except as sources of crime.

Why, for example, was the epidemic of Black on Black shootings at the time relegated to the back pages…or not reported at all. However, when a rare Black on White shooting occurred in the suburbs — despite the ban on race reporting — word would get out and eventually it would become front page stories about rap/hiphop music inspiring a young gangsta generation or some crap.

I disagree with the ban on race publication. But there are complexities to liberal media PCness. Why can't the media see African Americans as people instead of symbols of this or that social problem?

I agree with political correctness when the discrimination is gratuitous but not when it is reasonably relevant, such as in identifying a predator.