Brian Williams has been accused of many things, but being racist has not been one of them. Yet one of the stories Williams told whose authenticity has been called into question bears the hallmarks of subtle bigotry.
That story — told over the years to various reporters, writers and others — concerns the time Williams spent at the Ritz-Carlton in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, where he claims groups of dangerous men roamed the hallways with criminal intent.
“Our hotel was overrun with gangs,” Williams told former “NBC Nightly News” managing editor Tom Brokaw in a video published by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in June 2014. “You’d hear young, kind-of-thuggish kids walking about and down the hall all night,” he told author Judith Sylvester for her 2008 bookThe Media and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, according to The Washington Post.
It was revealed this week that Williams’ portrayal of the security situation at the Ritz-Carlton during Hurricane Katrina may not be accurate. As The Post points out, threeindividuals have said no gangs infiltrated the hotel, as Williams claims. The Post alsospoke with the hotel’s manager at the time, Myra DeGersdorff, who said the closest thing to there being “gangs” in the Ritz-Carlton was one incident where “maybe one or two” looters entered the hotel but were “immediately” chased out.
Whether or not his story is true, Williams’s choice of words is telling. Why did he seek to portray the criminals as “thuggish kids”? It seems that in grasping for a scary stereotype to add drama to his story, he settled on a word that conveyed a very specific image — that of a young black male, and one that white people might find frightening. The word “thug” is particularly useful in conjuring that stereotype because it’s a loaded term that stays (just barely) within the boundaries of what’s typically deemed “acceptable” language.
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