Why Was Muslim UCLA Shooter Misidentified as a "White Male"?

There is currently no indication that Muslim UCLA shooter Mainak Sarkar had any terrorist motives. Though his note has as yet of to be released. But of somewhat more interest is the question of why Sarkar was misidentified as a "white male".

One of the more obvious things about Maniak Sarkar is that he is not a white male. He can't be mistaken for a white male. But media coverage has prompted people to expect white male shooters.

It's a type of prejudice that we don't much talk about because it's a politically correct prejudice. It's a prejudice encouraged by the media. While Muslims certainly dominate terror statistics, there have been Muslim mass shooters carrying out attacks unrelated to terrorism.

The most prominent of these was the École Polytechnique Massacre carried out by a man popularly known as Marc Lepine, whose real name was Gamil Rodrigue Liass Gharbi. Gharbi shot nine women. Like Sarkar, the rationale was some combination of personal derangement and hostility toward women and people he blamed for his failures.

And yet Lepine continues to be misidentified in ways that lead people to assume that he was another white male shooter. Much like Sarkar was misidentified as a white male.

Beyond the obvious derangement of Islamic terrorism, Muslim societies are destabilized in ways that help spur violence even down the road among second generation immigrants. And yet the media is far more comfortable maintaining the stereotype of the white male shooter.

Everipedia is an alternative to Wikipedia but one that is as equally or perhaps even more unreliable.

https://www.everipedia.com/about/

Anyone can create an Everipedia page and anyone with an account can make edits but from what I understand there is even less editorial oversight than with Wikipedia. Note that Everipeida calls themselves the “a thugged-out Wikipedia” It does not require any source foot notes to substantiate claims and is highly “fluid”.

Here for instance is the Everipedia page for Donald Trump. Yea, that’s objective. / s

https://www.everipedia.com/donaldtrump/

There is no indication that Mainak Sarkar set up that Everipedia page and since it listed his date of death, it was obviously created afterwards. In addition to originally listing as Religion = Muslim, the Everipedia page also listed his ethnicity as “Bengali or Indian” – another clear tip off that this was not something Sarkar created himself as he would know what his ethnicity was.

And more importantly, Twitter profiles do not list info such as religion nor does it look anything like as the link provided (again that’s an Everipedia page, not a Twitter profile). I opened a Twitter account years ago but have rarely used. I just logged in to see what my profile looked like and what I could add or edit on my Twitter profile and it looks nothing like that.

The UCLA student editor (Pardes Seleh) is an idiot if she can’t tell the difference between an Everipedia page and a verified Twitter account profile. (Stupid blogger tag inserted here - )

I’ve seen no credible evidence proving that Sarkar was a Muslim or a Muslim convert. Crazy and vindictive? Yes. While it is said that Islam like liberalism, is a mental disorder, Muslims don’t hold all exclusive rights to that.

As to the “race” of Subcontinental” Indians, that is complicated.

The researchers showed that most Indian populations are genetic admixtures of two ancient, genetically divergent groups, which each contributed around 40-60% of the DNA to most present-day populations. One ancestral lineage — which is genetically similar to Middle Eastern, Central Asian and European populations — was higher in upper-caste individuals and speakers of Indo-European languages such as Hindi, the researchers found. The other lineage was not close to any group outside the subcontinent, and was most common in people indigenous to the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Bay of Bengal.

The researchers also found that Indian populations were much more highly subdivided than European populations. But whereas European ancestry is mostly carved up by geography, Indian segregation was driven largely by caste. "There are populations that have lived in the same town and same village for thousands of years without exchanging genes," says Reich.

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090922/full/news.2009.935.html

From what I understand, high caste, educated, lighter skinned and Hindi speaking Indians are more likely to identify themselves racially as Caucasians (or even as Aryans – Indo Europeans of Iranian and Northern Indian heritage – yes - the actual Aryans were not blue eyed blond Nordics) although in my HR experience, employees of Indian descent are likely to put down their race as “Asian”, perhaps because that is what the Brits historically refer to as the race of anyone from the subcontinent and from the middle east – i.e. “Middle Asian”. There was also a lot of racial mixing during the time when the British ruled India. Not all but especially a number of higher caste Indians have some British ancestors in their ancestry, while those from lower casts are typically much darker skinned.

And in the past some even tried to pass themselves off as having no Indian heritage at all, “passing for “”white””. An example of this is the actress Merle Oberon. She hid her Indian heritage, concocting a false biography as to her place of birth and even went so far as to keep her dark skinned Indian mother under wraps because back in those days, she wouldn’t have been able to have a career in Hollywood such as what she had.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2549874/Wuthering-Heights-actress-Merle-Oberons-secret-took-grave-sister-mother-gave-birth-aged-12.htm

You have to say who said it, where, and when.

Today, you can find always somebody somewhere tweeting something disreputable.

Why get bent out of shape about "the media" if it turns out it was only one guy in his pajamas somewhere?

So far, it looks like it was the school paper, The Daily Bruin, that made the misidentification.

That's more like a guy in his PJs than the LA or NY Times.

PS "Maniak" does describe the guy, but it's not his name.

PPS Searching for "Maniak Sarkar" brings up Manik Sarkar, an Indian Communist politician, probably no relation.

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