Desperately Looking for Racism

Here is a story of a man who walked the streets of New York with a shirt the resembled the Redskins logo but was instead the profile of a white man.  The faux team was the Caucasians.  That's funny.  I would laugh at that.  Certainly not offended by it.  Of note, the story is entirely self-reported.  The journalist takes his word for everything.  Sure, an old lady said it was disrespectful and a white guy called him an a--hole when he realized it wasn't a Redskins logo.  That is obviously the reaction Mr. Joseph wanted and that is the reaction he reports to Yahoo News.  And they parrot it without any skepticism.  Hmm.

By contrast, when a woman wanted to demonstrate that she was 'harassed' while walking down the street, she had it all on film.  Mr. Joseph should try his 'experiment' again and have a similar camera setup.  I am doubtful that his reported interactions would repeat.  Also, there would probably be a lot of laughs.  Checking the comments, it seems the majority had exactly my take on the story.

Speaking of the Redskins controversy, the team is not named that to be insulting or privileged.  Barring the rare exceptions (e.g. UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs, UC Irvine Anteaters), team names are chosen for being fierce (e.g. Lions, Bengals, Bears), or cool (e.g. Cowboys, Patriots, Buccaneers), or representative of local industry (e.g. Oilers, Packers, Steelers), and so forth.  Serious teams aren't named the Village Idiots, the Dolts, the Weaklings, etc.  No one wants a name that will provoke scorn or disrespect.  Should I be offended by the Boston Celtics or the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame?

 

Thought experiment: What if there was exactly one incident of overt racism every day and that one incident led the news that night.  Would that give an accurate picture of the level of racism in our society?  On the one hand, racist incidents are in the news every night but on the other hand there is only 1 incident a day in a country of 320 million people.  How we see the world is shaped and molded by the editorial decisions of a relatively small number of people.