There is an addiction one gets to webposts commentaries. There is the website for the Washington Post a local people here in the Metropolitan Washington D.C area. Like most people I don't actually subscribe to receive a physical newspaper. Instead I'm registered on the newpaper's website which so far is absolutely free.
On the Washington Post website, registered access grants you full view of articles you would normally read in the actual paper and then some. For nearly every article there is comments section in which people can post comments to article presumely after the entire article has been read. Here's the interesting and quite frankly disturbing part of this. The commentaries posted on articles related to crime or murder related incidents particularly taking place in Washington, DC and Prince Georges County, Maryland are typically racist. Not subtly racist, but racist to the point of almost being laughable. Usually if you attend to names posted (not the actual names of the posters of course) you see the same people posting the same kinds of comments.
For crime reports and like you go to the METRO Section under news. The articles usually deal with shootings, court cases and the stuff of crime show documentaries like The First 48 on cable channels like A&E. Sometimes the racial backgrounds of the suspects and the victims are mentioned in descriptions but usually they are not mentioned. Usually the commentators post what they assume are the perpetrator's racial backgrounds and more often than not the assumptions are that the perps are either African American or Hispanic American. What I find very interesting is that for a recent article on shooting taking place in Oxon Hill, Maryland, there was initally no mention of the racial of either the perps or the victims. However, the initial posts were indicating directly that the people involved were African American. This is so common with the WP commentaries on crime articles that it gets kind of sickening. It certainly defies the idea the "post racial" society we're supposed to be living in now, never that whole debacle over the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. which had everyone on both sides of the issue claiming either racism or "reverse racism".
I have to praise the Washington Post staff who monitor the posted commentaries and they are very aware of any breeches of their web posting policy. The either completely close the commentary section of an article or they directly remove a particular post. For the aforementioned article on the Oxon Hill Shooting, I noticed this evening that all the posts were removed. There are presently zero comments on that article. One thing about racism is that its a disease that infects everyone on some level. You find yourself being either very defensive about it or there are certain people for which you personally feel that your irrational beliefs, stereotypes are somehow justified. In either case it's a sad case for humanity in general. Posting rebuttables to the racist post is very pointless. Most of it is simply troll activity and somebody wants to get a flame war started. It's sometimes hard to remove yourself from them and not get personally involved. People want attention in this case. They want a reaction.
No comments:
Post a Comment