There are very few things that frustrate me more than people complaining in the comments of a tumblr post about how [insert online news headline] addresses a POC as “African woman” or “High School Girl” and just screaming “USE HER NAME!!!zsdfasid9jsfis”. 

Because, like, do you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how headlines work? You don’t start a headline with some name no one has ever heard before?? That’s not going to catch anyone’s eye. A headline is there to convey as much important information as possible in as few words as possible, so you will find and read the in-depth article assuming it pertains to your interests. A headline is there to give you the barest amount of background information about someone. 

You could, I suppose, argue that it’s racist because it’s pointing out that the person is a POC, but the fact that a POC is doing or achieving whatever thing the article is about is important for the very reason that you all are excited about the story. Often times it’s a science or other field where minorities have trouble getting a footing, so representation there is few and far between, and news articles about that are important for obvious reasons?

For example, let’s say an inventor named Rosa Smith, who invents a cool-revolutionary-science-thing. Let’s call it a photon reactor because I am no scientist, but I can make a mean sci-fi. Now let’s say I write an article that says “Rosa Smith invents photon reactor” you are not going to go “Oh nice, Black inventors!”. You’re not going to know why you should care. The words “Black scientist” are literally there for representation purposes, so you’ll know why this is important to you. 

I can guarantee that if you click on any of those articles the person’s name will be in the first paragraph, along with their age and occupation and all sorts of information pertinant to the story, literally unless they requested to be anonymous or something. They don’t just do this for POC? This is how all headlines work. Examples “Florida man”, “French Scientists”, etc. The article isn’t censoring their names, it’s writing a headline.

The only exception to this rule is household names like Oprah, Kim Kardashian, or Trump, because you don’t need background info on who they are, you already know who they are and why this is important to the story. The fact that Donald Trump is white and the president is of course important to the story, but unless you’ve been living under a rock you know that about him already. The most concise way to convey all of these salient points is his name. 

I care about representation and POC and the media having racism problems as much as the next person but as a communication major who doesn’t even have an interest in journalism you all need to chill a little in this particular area. If you stop getting needlessly annoyed in this area, you can expend all that energy getting mad about things that actually are causing problems! Like the news using mugshots in places they shouldn’t and all that good stuff. 

TL;DR - Please stop raging about news using epithets instead of names that mean nothing to the average reader in headlines about POC achievements. It has nothing to do with erasing their names or even with them being POC, and everything to do with concisely writing a headline. They do it this way for everyone. 

If anyone has a point I didn’t address here that changes things, please feel free to tell me about it. This is just a post written out of the limited knowledge that I have.

Have a great day!