"Of course, the post wasn't exactly demanding justice for people on two wheels. Dubbed an 'extremist hate-peddler' by the Human Rights campaign, Libs of TikTok has never mentioned anything close to the Vision Zero movement before this post - and they almost certainly didn't intend to, here. The account did not even bother to name the victim - 38-year-old Kjersten Strang - or offer any humanizing details about the single mom from St. Petersburg, Fla. who lost her life earlier this month."
"What the post did highlight prominently, though, was the fact that Strang was white, and her alleged killer, Xavier Omar Rigby, 22, was Black - a fact which countless racist commenters seized on as proof that news outlets are concealing an epidemic of similar crimes. The racist myth of a "Black-on-white" crime wave - and, to be clear, it is 100 percent a myth - is hardly a new phenomenon."
Far-right social media accounts amplify isolated transportation deaths by emphasizing perpetrators' race while omitting victim identity and structural road-safety factors. These accounts frame incidents as evidence of a supposed 'Black-on-white' crime wave despite that being false, driving racist commentary and misinformation. High-profile accounts highlighted race rather than contextual contributors such as wide, high-speed roads without protected bike lanes. Other far-right figures repeated errors and unverified claims while ignoring safety context. The rhetoric is being used to justify authoritarian transportation policies and to undermine systemic road-safety reforms like Vision Zero.
Read at Streetsblog
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