Race, Ethnicity, and the Media

Race, Ethnicity, And the Media

Race Ethnicity Article Review

Race, Ethnicity and the Media

When the Boston Marathon was bombed last week, race and ethnicity quickly became an issue in the media. Many felt that it was Islamic terrorists who placed the bombs because this type of Improvised Explosive Device (IED) had been used by that group in the past. When it was discovered that the perpetrators were Russian, specifically from the Caucasus region, many wondered what impact this information would have. I chose an article about the racial/ethnic controversy that is being debated in regard to the two young men who placed the bombs. The article is titled "Are the Tsarnaevs White?" And I found it on the Daily Beast website. Because I wanted an article that involved the recent bombings and a racial/ethnic component, I "googled" the words race and ethnicity in the news section and scrolled down until I found an article that involved the recent attacks in Boston. With a title like "Are the Tsarnaevs White?" I looked into the article, and when I read it, I found my article.

Shortly after the bombings a writer for Salon wrote an article which argued that if the bomber was white then the resulting civil liberties crackdown could be minimized. Soon after it was revealed who the bombers were, many claimed that the Tsarnaev brothers were not white because they were followers of Islam. This article is an attempt to explain the folly of assigning racial terms to religious groups as the two brothers were from the Caucasus region of Russia, the origin of the term "Caucasian," or white. In America, there have been many instances of people committing racial crimes against those they believed were Muslim, when in fact they were a completely different religion completely. It was the fact that people could not identify a person's religion which led them to mistakenly attack those they believed looked Muslim. And this invariably led them to commit crimes against those of darker complexion and dark skin. In fact, the author of the article claims that "Americans still link Islam with dark skin." (Beinart)

If there is one thing that the article's author seems to want to get across to the reader it is the fact that those who follow Islam come from a variety of racial, and ethnic backgrounds. In the past many believe that all Muslims are Middle Eastern, and vice versa, all Middle Easterners were Islamic. It actually took several court cases for the Supreme Court to identify which people from the Middle Eastern were "white," and which were not. The determining factor seems to be the religion of the person or group in question as those who claimed to be Christian were granted the classification of "white." This ignorant and racially-based determination continues to plague the American psyche and Americans still seem to classify anyone who is Muslim as "non-white." The fact that the two responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings were immediately classified as non-white simply because they were Muslims is an example of this type of mentality. And the fact that they were from the region where the term "Caucasian" originates only makes those who claim that the Tsarnaevs were not white appear even more foolish.