No matter how many I come across, headlines like this in today’s Providence Journal astonish me: “5 white men chosen as police finalists.”  What is the insinuation?  And given the insinuation, what is the point?

In paragraph 14 of 18, we learn:

There was diversity in the beginning crop of candidates, who took the preliminary agility test. The chief and Mayor Allan W. Fung saw to it that a special outreach was made to minorities, including joint appearances on Spanish-language radio shows and on the public-access TV show hosted by Vincent.

And yet the result was five white guys.  How demeaning of their accomplishment.  How reductive of humanity .

Look, if reporter Gregory Smith has some hunch that a diverse pool being winnowed down to those five men indicates some sort of bias, he should look for leads and do the investigation.  Simply splashing the end result into the newspaper as if there’s self-evidently something suspicious about the result is divisive and wrong.