“We will not let authoritarians dictate how we legislate in this state,” Jaelynn Scott said.
You know what I want? I don’t want to read stuff like this… Not because I don’t want it to happen but because it should be so normal that nobody cares!
I agree, but since it does matter let’s keep these stories coming until it doesn’t!
There’s a substantial school of philosophy that holds that continuously celebrating the first time someone from group X does thing Y tends to degrade public opinion of X, rather than supporting it.
The reasoning is that if the public mostly hears about group X in terms of the first time they did something that someone else has done, it entrenches the idea that group X is behind whoever did it first.
It essentially claims that celebrating firsts is initially good for group X but becomes negative over time. They would point out that the promise of “paving the way” rarely pans out. We saw the first woman elected as prime minister in 1960. People born then could be grandparents today and it’s still relatively rare to see women as the head of state.
From that perspective such articles would better support various groups if they focused on the accomplishments of the subjects rather than their identity. We don’t generally celebrate Ada Lovelace as the first female programmer; we celebrate her as the first programmer.
Note that I’m also making an assumption in terms of goals. The above only makes sense if you believe that it’s more important for an article to convince non-believers than to reassure believers.
That’s actually a convincing angle, as someone who grew up with blue collar rust belt types. I think what matters more than “the first” is just representation as a whole. It doesn’t matter to me if we celebrate the first gay character on TV, for instance, so long as we have lots of gay characters on TV. So making sure this information is carried to black and trans women especially, but maybe she doesn’t need to be national news for Fox News fodder, yeah. I can see that.
