Journalists trying really hard to inject racism into obscure Mississippi school incident

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The media seem hell-bent on making race relations in the U.S. worse, not better. Consider, for example, its coverage this weekend of what has every indication of being a Mississippi high school’s innocent screw-up.

A school administrator incorrectly awarded valedictorian and salutatorian to the wrong students. The mistake was brought to the school’s attention after the parents of the two students who should have won protested. The administrator, they noted, had incorrectly calculated the criteria used for determining the winners.

As a compromise, the school decided to split the baby, announcing the initial recipients will share the valedictorian and salutatorian titles with the two students whose grades actually earned them the honor.

This sounds like a boring story, unworthy of national news status — a story of confusion, compromise, and clerical errors by an employee of a school you’ve never heard of.

Except that the two students who were initially wrongly awarded valedictorian and salutatorian are black. The two students who will now share the honor with them are white.

This is enough for our very responsible and dispassionate press to allege there is something deeply racist about the entire affair. It is somehow a problem that white parents correctly pointed out that the school had incorrectly awarded valedictorian and salutatorian to the wrong students.

I’m not kidding when I say this is how the story is being framed by the press.

Here is the New York Times’s headline, “Two Black Students Won School Honors. Then Came the Calls for a Recount.” Its subhead reads, “After two white families claimed a grade calculation error, a Mississippi school added their children as co-valedictorian and co-salutatorian, reviving questions about race and equity.”

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