It comes daily by e-mail, and I generally read the main stories every weekday. I find them to be mostly biased, but not as badly as I expected. In several, I found fodder for blog posts. These emails I saved, while all other of these newsletters I discard. Recently, I was trying to reduce the number of emails in my inbox. I started with the oldest, one of which was Morning for Nov 30, 2021.
The lead story was the trial, just concluded, of the murderers of Ahmaud Arbery. Remember that? He’s a black man who was jogging in a mostly white neighborhood, stopped to look in a house under construction, and was murdered by three white men. They were convicted in the trial.
Here’s how the Times began the story.
The most effective way to achieve racial justice can sometimes be to downplay race.
That may seem like a counterintuitive idea. And it can certainly feel unsatisfying to people who are committed to reducing the toll of racism in the United States. But it is one of the lessons of the murder convictions last week of three white men in Georgia, in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man.
In previous posts about racism and how to end it, I brought up the idea that it takes many approaches to end racism. I differentiated between racism, the ending of which requires changes in the hearts of people, and racist acts, against which legislation, policies, and an honest justice system can make a big dent in.
The Times story indicated that the prosecutor’s strategy was considered controversial because she mostly ignored race and made it a simple murder trial. Three men killed an innocent man, thinking they would take the law in their own hands. Critics thought she should make the trial about the racism of the three killers, their racism spilling over into a horrible racist act. Had she lost the case, she would have been soundly excoriated.
This prosecutor decided, rightly so, that a non-racism approach was the right approach. Sometimes it’s right to be color blind. That’s how I want to live my life. That’s how Mom and Dad taught us kids. Of course, they never told us we were mixed race, but that’s a story for another post.
Later in the newsletter article, the NYT further endorsed this multiple strategies needed approach.
The Arbery trial offers a reminder that calling out racism is not the only way to battle it. Sometimes, a more effective approach involves appealing to universal notions of fairness and justice. [Emphasis added]
If different approaches are what’s needed, then I suppose I should not criticize those who make race a defining characteristic in almost every human interaction. To me that seems wrong, but I won’t say those that take a different approach than me are wrong. May both approaches work together toward the goal of ending racist acts and eradicating racism from the hearts of men.