Argument continues whether white marathon bomber would be put to death were he white

Brett T. | 12:28 AM on May 17, 2015

If there’s one thing we learned from the media Saturday about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s sentencing to the death penalty, it’s that Slate contributor Seth Stevenson spends longer than 14-and-a-half hours online to shop for a single pair of pants. And if there’s one thing we learned from Twitter, Tsarnaev either is or isn’t white, and that had a lot to do with the jury’s decision.

https://twitter.com/tr00ist/status/599307515126353920

Except he is white. RT @tr00ist I'm about 99% sure that Tsarnaev wouldn't be murdered by the state if he was white.

— Kerfuffle Actual? (@shoshido) May 15, 2015

The fight over whether Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is white goes all the way back to April 2013, when Salon contributor David Sirota expressed his hope that the bomber would be found to be a white American. After the Tsarnaev brothers were fingered, the fretting over their skin color continued. Salon editor at large Joan Walsh wrote that they “are quite literally Caucasian, as in from the Caucuses …. And ethnically in this country, we count Americans of Russian descent, as well as Chechens, as white.” Her analysis was echoed by The Daily Beast’s Peter Beinart, who wrote that “the Tsarnaevs hail from the Caucasus, and are therefore, literally, ‘Caucasian.’ You can’t get whiter than that.”

That’s pretty white. So what’s this business about the chances of Tsarnaev not being “murdered by the state if he was white”?

https://twitter.com/BayAreaFan2/status/599313285494673408

@EdgeOfEurope No, no, he’s not white because he’s a Muslim from the Caucasus. If he wasn’t Muslim, then he’d be white. @tr00ist

— 16 Handles fan accou? (@BasedKashiBar) May 15, 2015