I'm glad that they caught the perpetrator and that it wasn't racially motivated; but I'm sad that our media jumped on a story of racism and reported it like it was a perfect example of the white racism problem in our country.
In reality, racism has continually trended toward decreasing in our country over the last fifty years. (There has been an increase in hate crimes reported according to the FBI over the last few years, with an especially bad year in 2017, although, it is hard to tease out actual increases from increased reporting. As most statisticians are estimating that the FBI has been under-estimating by orders of magnitude because of a lack of reporting, and it does make sense that as racial relations improve there would be an increase in reporting, so I'm not sure how to consider these trends. I'm not saying racism isn't an issue anymore, or that that there isn't systemic racism that still affects black communities negatively (although to what extent those systemic inequalities are more a result of classism and aimed at maintaining economic disparities rather than racially motivated seems inconclusive to me). I'm just sick of the media, that only seems to prioritize sensationalism, painting a worse picture of our country, and specifically of race relations here than is true to reality. It does us all a disservice. We can make progress, better progress I believe, toward good relations between all the many diverse people who live here by highlighting positive progress rather than sensationalizing a few negative anecdotes; especially where such anecdotes are twisted to fit an unhelpful unsupportable narrative, or worse, woven from whole cloth.