Posted on 03/26/2021 6:01:52 AM PDT by Kaslin
A USA Today editor on Tuesday deleted a tweet following a mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado, that left ten people dead, including a Boulder police officer.
“It’s always an angry white man. Always,” Hemal Jhaveri, the Race and Inclusion Editor at USA TODAY Sports Media Group, tweeted on Monday following the shooting.
The following day, after it was revealed the suspect’s name is Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, a Syrian immigrant, Jhaveri apologized.
“I deleted a previous tweet that was posted in haste and poor judgement. My tweet was impulsive and an over-generalization, for which I apologize. That over-generalization does not reflect the values of this position or Gannett,” Jhaveri said.
I deleted a previous tweet that was posted in haste and poor judgement. My tweet was impulsive and an over-generalization, for which I apologize. That over-generalization does not reflect the values of this position or Gannett.— Hemal Jhaveri (@hemjhaveri) March 23, 2021
Jhaveri’s apology is both welcome and warranted. It was distasteful, if not outright bigoted.
What’s stunning is just how many people responded in a similar fashion. Caleb Hull, a communications strategist and social media influencer, posted a thread on Twitter that revealed an astonishing number of journalists and public influencers responded much like Jhaveri.
Many would agree that making baseless claims about race in response to tragedies isn’t just ugly and racist. It’s also dangerous.
From Medgar Evers to Emmett Till and beyond, America’s history is replete with examples of what happens when race and group identity rise above our sense of justice. But the danger goes even further.
In his book Death By Government, the political scientist R.J. Rummel documented more than 133 million murders of civilians by governments in the 20th century. It’s a historical fact that group identity was a primary catalyst for tens of millions of these deaths.
“Many of those murders were of groups of people — Armenians, Bangladeshis, Bosnians, Chinese, Jews, Poles, Rwandans, Ukrainians — murders driven by ethnic tribal hatred,” the economist Barry Brownstein has pointed out.
The efforts to tie a mass murder to someone’s race or culture is dangerous and defies a simple truth: all humans are capable of good and evil. The great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had it right when he observed the true boundary of good and evil runs through each of us.
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart,” the Gulag Archipelago writer wrote.
One can recognize this basic reality and also admit that seeing others as individuals isn’t easy. The truth is, we’ve all generalized at one time or another (which is why we shouldn’t deal too harshly with people like Jhaveri who fire off a dumb tweet). There are reasons for this. As the author Matt Ridley points out in his book The Origins of Virtue, the human tendency to form groups and battlelines is part of our evolutionary fiber.
“We have as many darker as lighter instincts,” writes Ridley. “The tendency of human societies to fragment into competing groups has left us with minds all too ready to adopt prejudices and pursue genocidal feuds.”
Yet these prejudices serve no one; nor does our obsession on group identity, which runs counter to our most fundamental values.
“The idea of the divine individual, that is the West. If we subsume that under group identity we will perish—painfully,” the best-selling author Jordan Peterson said in a 2018 talk with comedian Adam Carolla. “God only knows what will go along with us. Maybe everything.”
Unfortunately, with the rise of woke culture, a doctrine that teaches people to see others in terms of group identity, this is becoming more difficult. (Columbia University, for example, recently announced it intends to hold six separate graduation ceremonies for students based on race and other group identity factors.)
Difficult as it may be, striving to see each other as individuals is the proper goal, and to abandon this principle is no small matter.
“Look at what happened in the 20th century when people put group identity first,” Peterson observed. “How much bloody evidence do you need? The Communists did it for good reasons and the Nazis did it for bad reasons. It didn’t matter. Tens of millions of people died horribly as a consequence.”
The solution is clear. Embrace the truth and beauty in the reality that every human being is an individual with unique thoughts, perspectives, experiences, and dreams.
It’s a simple idea, and it just might save the world.
A truthfully informed public is essential to representative government.
Obviously those who do not want the public to be truthfully informed do not want representative government and intend to establish tyranny.
Oh really?
Maybe they’ll get their wish for civil conflict. They probably war gamed it and have decided that they will crush us. A few well publicised arrests to make examples and a couple drone strikes on anyone seriously considered a threat. They have decided most trad americans will impotently sulk and submit. The trouble in war is that the other side gets a vote. In 1861 there were those in the south who said the north didn’t have the stomach for a fight, and in the north they said the south couldn’t stand against their industrial might. 4 years later and 600000 dead everyone wished they had avoided it entirely.
Imagine a White editor writing, falsely:
“It’s always an angry black man. Always,”
That would be his last day working at that paper - or any paper.
She should lose her job and career as so many like her demand of Whites when they say something they don’t like, even if true.
“From Medgar Evers to Emmett Till and beyond, America’s history is replete with examples of what happens when race and group identity rise above our sense of justice.”
Pure old-fashioned virtue signaling here. He could have just as easily picked two examples out of hundreds of RERCENT white victims of black homocidal violence and not two black victims from well over 50 years ago.
Ole Hemal only applogized when he found out it was someone just like him.
If the Lame Street Media outlets were held responsible for false news, most of them would be gone.
Hemal Jhaveri is the “Race and Inclusion Editor” at USA Today. LOL!
Your comments track with my first impression ... anyone who has that sort of instantaneous gut-level reaction to a tragedy like this should not be in the information business.
Now that it has been a few days, why is this person still employed? Their next job should be cleaning septic tanks in Death Valley ...
“It’s always an angry white man. Always,” Hemal Jhaveri, the Race and Inclusion Editor at USA TODAY Sports Media Group, tweeted on Monday following the shooting.
Hemal Jhaveri
I wonder if she knows Hewud Jhablomi?
Only when truthfully informed can people make good decisions and exercise good judgment.
The search for truth--truth for its own sake--wherever it may present itself is the foundation of Western Civilisation and the scientific method.
Contempt for truth is the evil most fundamental to the decadence of Western Civilisation.
The extent of an individual's (or an institution's) contempt for truth is a measure of the depths to which he has succumbed to dishonesty, corruption, and the suicidal disease of decadence and is an indication of how much he cannot be trusted.
The media thinks it’s trendy to have white hate/guilt and it keeps the from doing real and honest reporting.
To many so called reporters are computer reporters seldom out on the street in the real world.
You saw that too, eh?
Hatred among white liberal 'elites' and their butt boys in the press is scary.
In most countries the press stands with the powerless - here they stand with the 'elites'... It's as if the Mexican press always jumped in to defend the poor cartels...
Town hall crap with stupid questions and answers
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