phase_54_logoEarlier today we noted an odd story in the East Valley Tribune, which detailed a legal dispute between a new nightclub and some other local businesses, a group of restaurants at the same strip mall.

The dispute has something to do whether the place is a club, a nightclub or a concert venue.

Way down in the story there were unexplained references to remarks about the clientele’s “race.”

But the story never said what “race” was being singled out. It could have been Hispanic or Asian, Ewok or Eloi, black or … [gulp!] white!

Friends in Chandler have subsequently informed us that clientele is black—and that African Americans were the object of the alleged racial comments alluded to in the story.

I dug through the EVT’s archive on the dispute, but didn’t find an example of the paper’s having vouchsafed this information to its readers.

Besides one sidelong reference to a “civil rights” aspect—“civil rights” being a well-known euphemism for “black-related”—there was nothing to let a disinterested reader know what in the hell was going on.

Isn’t this overdelicate? On the one hand we have the crazy Arizona Republic, which insists on capitalizing the words “black” and “white.” The Republic’s treatment gives you the sense that someone there was indignant that the word “black” was getting capitalized, and insisted on capitalizing “white,” too.

It is a practice that to my knowledge is followed by no other daily paper in the country. The Republic is the journalistic equivalent of a kid wondering why moms and dads get Mother’s Days and Father’s Days, but there’s no Kid’s Day.

(The answer, of course is that every day is Kid’s Day.)

And now we have the EVT, trying in effect whisper the news.

“It’s about race.”

Huh?

“It’s about race.”

Huh?


Previously in PHXated:

Why does the Arizona Republic capitalize the words “white” and “black”?.