On Thursday night, a sniper shot 14 people, killing five police officers in Dallas, turning a peaceful protest against the police shootings into a scene of chaos and making it the deadliest day for US law enforcement since the 9/11 attacks.
This turned out to be by far one of the saddest moments in US history, and in the entire world actually, as it showed everyone that we’re still living in a world full of injustice, and that sadly racism still exists till this very day.
And while international organizations and movements like “Black Lives Matter” have been campaigning against racism and violence against black people, here in Egypt El Shorouk News decided to embrace the racism by publishing the news of the shooting and using the derogatory N-WORD on the FRONT PAGE HEADLINE!
Now how this happened is beyond us, how this went through a series of writers and editors, was approved and went to print just shows the kind of mentality that still exists in Egypt. It shows how we use still use words like the n-word or ‘slave’ as regular words in our daily lives without even thinking twice about the impact of those words and how offensive they are; and it shows that we’re still hundreds of years behind in every single aspect and in every single way.
The people at the newspaper later realized their mistake as it changed the title in its second print from “American N*ggers Raise Their Weapons Against Police Violations” to “Black American Soldier Raises His Weapon Against Police Violations” but it was too late because once someone notices something and puts it on the Internet, it’s there forever. The picture sparked a lot of controversy online and was noticed by many high profile people like former BBC journalist Liliane Daoud who retweeted the picture.
WE SAID THIS: It’s still sad that at this point of time, things like this are still happening. Shame on you, El Shorouk for literally adding insult to injury and for making an unfortunate situation even worse.