Last night I was watching the local news (mainly for the weather) when they did a story about a Washington University coed raped in her dorm room. They talked about the suspect, read a description, and never mentioned he’s black. I only know that because they showed the composite sketch. My wife thought it odd that they would mention gender, height, weight, age, hair length, even the cap he was wearing, in describing him, but not his skin color. Fox 2 News has the same lack of information. KMOV, the TV news outlet in town we usually watch (and I’m not sure why we were watching KSDK instead of KMOV – maybe because Karen Foss retired) has no trouble in using his skin color. I guess KMOV isn’t worried all us bigots will be confirmed in our error.
So today I’m not surprised by this news: Another rape a Duke University, but no mention of (black) skin color. The media just keeps protecting us from our baser instincts – or so they think.
Think they’d ever caught Michael Devlin if they didn’t include the color of the pickup in its description? White, BTW.
