CNN.com ran an article Wednesday about the phenomenon of “racism without racists,” in which “unsuspecting people … see the world through a racially biased lens.”
This theory is said to explain why whites and blacks tend to have such opposite reactions to the grand jury’s decision not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown – whites simply don’t realize their unconscious racism.
A black student official at Ohio University seemed to show the same hesitance to explicitly call white students racists, while tacitly saying they are, in a student senate meeting Nov. 19.
The offense she highlighted? Being mistaken for another black woman in a photo caption in The Post, the school’s official paper.
As explained below, though, the caption is still wrong in another use of the photo – and it has nothing to do with race.
An ‘Egregious’ Mistake Committed Against Your Queen
According to a transcript she provided to The New Political, an independent Ohio University news website, Treasurer Zainab Kandeh told the senate that The Post made an “egregious mistake” by identifying her as pictured in a photo that actually depicted Academic Affairs Commissioner Jolana Watson.
Kandeh tells the senate that because she’s “a trained journalist” and “a woman of color,” she couldn’t let the incorrect caption “slide.” You see, Kandeh is an unusually special student whom everyone should recognize:
Despite having been awarded the Top Undergraduate of 2014 during the Spring Leadership Gala, featured in the “It’s Y [ ] U” campaign where my face hung in Baker for a year, this semester’s Homecoming Queen and most recently Scripps Next Top … there is no excuse I can possibly imagine as to why that photo was approved by several people, sent to the printer and then published online.
The paper’s first correction correctly identified the official as Watson but called her a “candidate for treasurer,” the office that Kandeh eventually won – a revision that Kandeh said “marginalized and erased my identity as the actual treasurer.” (Kandeh ran on a competing ticket.)
The second attempt at a correction left up the photo that featured Watson instead of Kandeh, and simply said that Watson has been initially misidentified as Kandeh. This also annoyed Kandeh because the correction was at the bottom of the story.
The editor, Jim Ryan, admitted to Kandeh that the paper had wrongly identified people “of varying gender and skin color” in the paper just this semester. He called the errors “idiotic” and said they “stemmed from a lack of thoroughness from our editorial staff,” not “systemic racial insensitivity.”
Kandeh can’t bring herself to actually accuse the paper’s editors of racism, so she plays the race card through euphemism:
I will say that I do not believe in any way that The Post is racist. I do not believe that the error came from a place of malice or was intentional, but I believe that it simply comes from a place of ignorance and not the kind of ignorance in which one is not open to learning but simply doesn’t know.
Even as Kandeh says that she – a broadcast journalism major – can understand errors made during “late night editing” and the general “mistakes and errors” that even she has made, she again calls the mistake “egregious” and a symptom of “ignorance.”
Really?
The Media F— Up Captions Constantly
The Post still has an incorrect caption for that same photo of two white women and one black woman, but it’s not Watson who’s misidentified.
The caption mixes up Caitlyn McDaniel (who is pushing a $15 campus wage) and Megan Marzec (the infamous “Blood Bucket Challenge” instigator) and misspells Marzec’s surname. Marzec is actually in the middle.
See that? This caption that mixes up two white women has been wrong since the spring and it’s still up – probably because no one is calling it an “egregious” example of “ignorance,” which appears to be Kandeh’s code for “you whites think we all look alike.”
It’s a stupid caption mistake. It happens all the time, for any number of reasons, to all races, genders and socioeconomic groups.
It’s not just campus papers that screw up identifications – it’s mainstream media, every frickin’ day. Zainab Kandeh may be a talented student, but her face is nowhere near as memorable and impossible to misidentify as, say, Bruce Jenner’s.
That doesn’t justify media outlets misidentifying people so regularly. Editors should carefully scrutinize captions, spelling, titles and all those other irritating but necessary details that distinguish responsible outlets from reckless first-to-publish zealots.
But self-important geniuses like Kandeh aren’t doing anyone favors by not-quite-saying that rushed editors are not-quite-showing their racist attitudes because they f—ed up a caption.
Greg Piper is an assistant editor at The College Fix. (@GregPiper)
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IMAGES: The Post screenshots
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