Okay, how about putting your sarcasm aside for a second and asking yourself where those metal shavings came from. They didn't just manifest there all by themselves, you know. Someone must have been working nearby, drilling a hole or whatever, and simply forgot to clean up after themselves, because they didn't think it was important.
Now, that COULD have happened to anybody, but when all of SJW Twitter, and even the National Museum of African American History have been informing us for the past five years that things like being competent at your job, having attention to detail, following rules, etc. are all symptoms of whiteness and therefore racist, it paints a certain picture of the most likely candidate, doesn't it?
For all the Newsweek agitprop, it should be noted that "Whiteness" isn't clearly defined. Its a political definition that can include East Indians and exclude Poles and the Irish, depending on who is writing the law.
In a city like NY, with a very long and tawdry record on race politics, it can get confusing for a person wandering through a history exhibit to understand how and why certain ethnic cohorts gain or lose their "White" qualifier. So a museum establishing some kind of historically informed guideline to clarify can be helpful. Particularly when so much of their audience may be themselves or have relatives in their own living history who did not qualify as they do today.
I found it funny that when applying for jobs with the NYC government, Italians were not actually considered white. They were included in the affirmative action policies with other minorities. Definitely shows how the category of whiteness can evolve.
I mean, its amusing at first glance. But half my family is Italian. Quite a few of them have stories from parents/grandparents, etc about the genuinely nasty racist policies the city had towards Italians, Latinos, and Irish ex-pats - everything from redlining policies and employment blacklists to police gangs brutalizing relatives and government officials refusing to honor debts or outright stealing property unimpeded.
The social and legal justifications used are all common to the Smithsonian "Aspects of Whiteness" list above. Italians were generally described as a lazy, untrustworthy, dimwitted, and even sub-human population. They were accused of everything from vagrancy and slobbery to organized pedophilia. And that, unsurprisingly, had an impact on Italian immigrant community abilities to accrue wealth and status in the city and the surrounding areas.
That's much less true now (although curiously not entirely absent, depending on who you talk to). But the legacy of discrimination has a real downward impact on plenty of people's livelihoods to this day. If nothing else, there's a ton of NYC real estate in the hands of grandchildren of kleptocrats who profited by seizing it from folks lower on the racial totem pole.
I don't know that it's agitprop, many other outlets reported on this as well and Newsweek's article seems rather matter-of-factly and doesn't really take any sides on this issue. As far as political leaning goes, Newsweek is pretty much right in the center, that's why I chose their article on it, in order to have as little bias as possible.
As far as political leaning goes, Newsweek is pretty much right in the center
Citing "Forbes", a magazine owned and operated by a former Republican Presidential candidate and The Wall Street Journal, a Murdoch publication, in the center of the spectrum is... definitely one way to weight the scales. Bloomberg, a publication entirely by and for Wall Street, is center-left? Hell, the State Department's favorite news network, MSNBC, is in the same column as Jacobin and The Intercept?
Feel free to provide a better chart, I just googled “media bias” and clicked the first link that came up.
Either way, as far as I know, Newsweek isn’t exactly known for spicy takes or hardline opinions. It also just happened to be the first search result, so perhaps I’m just lazy.
It only “looks rather likely” from the perspective of a racist. I would look to an explanation that doesn’t require conspiracy theory levels of mental gymnastics.
I saw the maga crowd bitching about woke politics being to blame when the Key Bridge collapsed, but I didn’t think they genuinely believed something so fucking braindead. Apparently I was wrong!
Why don’t you prove your ingenius “women of color saboteurs” theory? Maybe with something a little more substantial then “you don’t know where those metal shavings came from, so it’s probably woke politics.” For all the evidence you’ve presented, those metal shavings may as well have spontaneously generated.
Also if you absolutely insist on keeping up the whole racism thing, you should expect people to be rather curt with you, if not outright hostile. Wild as it is, kind society doesn’t take kindly to racists.