NY Times Writer Fails to Acknowledge Race When Suspect is Black

Ginia Bellafonte just five years ago was beside herself at how Caucasian the line-up of Rockettes dancers was, calling the performance she attended during the Christmas season “an eerie celebration of whiteness.” (‘Tis the season!)

But in a painfully obtuse article this week, the New York Times columnist found nothing remarkable about the obvious racial pattern among a raft of women randomly sucker-punched by men on the streets of her own city. Namely, that the assailants are all black.

That overt detail was evidently beside the point to Bellafonte, who was instead preoccupied this time not with the race of the offenders, but with the sex of the victims.

“Like all conversations about crime in New York City these days,” wrote Bellafonte, “the one taking hold around these attacks over the past month has quickly defaulted to questions about mental illness and whether the men walking around impulsively hitting women in the face were merely disturbed — as if it warranted no consideration that a psychological malady might find such brute expression in an antagonism directed at women.”

The spate of attacks in recent weeks involves unsuspecting women who, out of nowhere and in broad daylight, suffers a blow to their heads by strange men passing by. It’s true this makes the matter especially appalling. But if the consistency in the sex attacked is useful, wouldn’t it be helpful to note other similarities?

As Bellafonte noted in her column, two arrests have been made in relation to the sucker-punch episodes, although she identified neither by name and only described one of the men in part as having “an Instagram page with provocative images of young women and pictures of himself standing in front of a ‘Trump: Make America Great Again’ sign.”

So, the politics of this man are important — he’s MAGA! — but not his race or name. Fascinating.

Contrary to what a reader might assume, the alleged Trump-loving woman abuser is not named Kyle Vanderbilt. It’s Skiboky Stora, a 40-year-old black man who ran for New York mayor and whose Instagram page shows him menacing women around the city.

In one video, he stalks a white woman who’s attempting to avoid him on the sidewalk as he repeatedly tells her to “slow down” and “put the phone down.” In another, he records a men’s clothing ad featuring a white male model and says, “Look what these white people got going on in our community. Little black kids see this sh-t.”

As for the second man charged with abruptly bashing his fist into an unknown woman’s head, that man is 30-year-old Mallik Miah. I’ll let you guess his race. (He’s black.)

Bellafonte wrote in her article that this should be “a moment to heighten the effort at helping women protect themselves.” Wouldn’t knowing the racial profile of the likely criminal provide a boost in that area? The more information, the better.

After all, Bellafonte was acutely aware of racial matters in her equally dangerous visit to the Rockettes performance. “The show I saw featured, as far as I could tell, only one African-American dancer in the lineup of close to 40,” she wrote. “There were, in the end, more camels on stage than black women.”

I emailed Bellafonte on Friday asking about her omission of the men’s ethnicity in her column about the assaults, but received no response. Perhaps she’s busy counting the number of black diners at Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville.

At the end of March, police said there had been at least seven surprise knockout attacks on women. Other perpetrators still at large are seen on videos that show they’re black. Is there any question that, if this were a pattern of white men whaling on innocent passersby in the middle of the day, a writer at the New York Times would find it worth mentioning? We’d be hearing about rampant white male supremacy for weeks.

The racial details of unassuming women victimized by violent men on the sidewalk are apparently of no consequence when the criminals are black.