No Country for Young Men

It smelled funny immediately when not one of the 2,201 reports worldwide on the recent Manitoba bus beheading mentioned the perpetrator's race. After all, they immediately speculated as to the race of the victim--”apparently aboriginal.” They were also prepared to say that the perpetrator was in his forties, about six feet tall, had short hair, and weighed about 200 pounds. Obviously, over the several hours he was surrounded in the bus with the severed head, someone got a decent look at him.

They still do not mention the perpetrator's (I do not say “suspect”; to do so in this case would be and is logically absurd) race. But his name is Vince Weiguang Li—in Chinese, oddly enough, that would be Vince Foreign Prairie Plum. And, given his face in the now-published photos, were I to see it in a bus, I would immediately assume he was ethnically East Asian. Still no comment from the press, though.

Isn't that strange? Had the perpetrator been “Caucasian-looking,” do you suppose this would not have been reported? Random check—the first unrelated Canadian crime story I find on Google News: “Stabbed Good Samaritan in Stable Condition”

See paragraph 8:

“Witnesses described the man with the knife as Caucasian, approximately 20 years old, five-feet-seven to five-feet-10 inches tall, wearing a white hoodie, jeans and a ball cap.”

Interestingly, in this latter case, it is the ethnicity of the victim that is not reported.

My guess is that he, too, was Caucasian, and not Samaritan.

It appears that the victim of the bus beheading, judging by his name—Tim McLean--was not aboriginal at all, but... Caucasian. Has this fact been pointed out in subsequent news stories? No. His ethnicity is now apparently unmentionable.

What we have here, put bluntly, is systemic racism. The journalistic rule seems to be: if a victim is Caucasian, you do not mention this. If he might be of any other race, you say so. If a criminal is Caucasian, you say so. If he might be of any other race, you do not mention this.

The net effect is necessarily to spread hatred and contempt towards Caucasians: for in the press, the distinct impression is being systematically given that criminals are always Caucasians, and victims are not.

Perhaps related: nothing ever gets perceived as a “hate crime” if the criminal is non-Caucasian and the victim Caucasian. “Hate crimes” by definition apparently can only be crimes committed by Caucasians against non-Caucasians.

Was the bus beheading a hate crime? Quite possibly; the truth is, one can almost never tell, and it should not be relevant. But one thing seems to me pretty sure: if the victim has been Chinese, and the perpetrator Caucasian, it would have been reported as such.

And such reporting may be in part responsible for the death of young Timothy McLean.