LONDON, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 13: Logos for the microblogging site Twitter, displayed on the internet on September 13, 2013 in London, England. Twitter has announced plans to float on the stockmarket. (Photo by Mary Turner/Getty Images) (2013 Getty Images)
There is a new and very easy way for mainstream journalists to condemn America for racism, while doing as little work as possible except for pulling out the thesaurus to find synonyms for the word “outrage.”
It's called finding racists on Twitter.
There are millions of Americans on the microblogging social media platform, so chances are you can search for your favorite racist epithet, and find plenty of willing accomplices to help you advance whatever political agenda your little partisan heart desires.
Enter this year's Miss America winner.
One of the insults made against Nina Davuluri was the following, “Miss America? You mean Miss 7-Eleven.” Awful? Yes. Racist? Yes?
Nina Davuluri won the glittering crown to become the first ever Indian-American to do so. Surely, a proud moment for America, and a sign of the changing demographics of our country. That's about all that needs to be said about that.
Unless you have a pathological need, a deep-seated desire and hunger to prove that beneath every American is a rampaging evil sadistic racist.
Enter the media!
The Daily Beast tweets that Nina Davuluri is now “struggling” with racism because of her crown. As far as I can tell, the only reason she's “struggling” is because the media is giving the racists so much attention.
Time magazine breathlessly posted under the headline 'Miss America Victory Marred by Racist Slurs' about three tweets, one of which is already deleted. Supposedly it took "an hour for the rest of the Twittersphere to drown out the bigots." Really? Do these writers even understand how Twitter works?
As usual, Buzzfeed beats the usual suspects in ferreting out perpetrators to suit the “racist America” narrative. They highlight about 18 tweets of ignorant people saying something disgusting about the pageant winner. Eighteen out of millions of Americans on Twitter, but the post has received five million views.
If America's racism has been relegated to making stupid comments on Twitter, you'll pardon me if I don't join the chorus of wailing while hand-wringing in horror.
They probably do, but it's more useful to pretend that a handful of racists on Twitter is a horror that every American needs to know about and excoriate.
I just ran a quick search for the sentence, “white people are stupid.” There are six tweets just in the last 24 hours with that sentiment – why isn't that a headline? The plain fact underlying these kinds of stories is that you can find a handful of tweets for nearly any heinous opinion you want to see.
One of the insults made against Nina Davuluri was the following, “Miss America? You mean Miss 7-Eleven.”
Awful? Yes. Racist? Yes? Debilitating and paralyzing evidence that Americans are backwards troglodytes who need soulful self-examination and flagellation for its racist sins? No, not so much.
This reminds me of another similar racist remark:
“You cannot go to a 7 Eleven or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking!”
Awful? Yes. Racist? Yes. Now guess who said it.
The correct answer is the dim-witted guy who'll become the President of these United States should anything happen to Obama - Joe Biden!
So why is the media harping over some random pathetic racists among millions of non-racist Americans on Twitter, when there was barely any coverage of nearly the exact same joke from the Vice President of the United States?
The correct answer starts with an “m” and ends with an “edia bias.”
It doesn't take a beauty pageant winner to figure this one out.
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