I wholly agree with you in sentiment that context matters, but how the hell is that article equivalent to the one here lol, I have to ask
Your article has to do with white farmers specifically targeted by the black government of Zimbabwe, literal racism, so the race of the farmers is actually relevant.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'equivalent', it's not something I said. I'm also not sure you've interpreted the contexts very accurately but if you happen to be unfamiliar with them, you can easily google up brief histories of Detroit and Zimbabwe and the central role race has played in both.
I agree that it depends on the circumstance. Particularly, it feels more like patronizing if we highlight an accomplishment for a particular reason that the party in question finds embarrassing. Maybe Johnny doesn't want to be applauded for doing his homework. But if he doesn't mind, then there is no harm to Johnny.
But there may be another, unintentional harm: the harm to the ego of everyone who isn't Johnny. They may feel hurt that their own accomplishments weren't highlighted. They may even try to defend this hurt feeling, by saying something like "So? We did our homework too. Johnny's not special. Don't you care about us?" But the point of the accolade was never to down-play everyone else's achievements; it was merely to recognize Johnny's. But the ego gets in the way, and prevents us from letting someone else have the spotlight. We see ourselves as smaller when our peers are raised higher than us, and this makes us defensive.
And the NBA is 78% black. Should articles about white NBA players (doing something totally unrelated to their whiteness) start with lines like "White NBA players start charity for kids with cancer"?
Or maybe their race has nothing to do with their actions, and therefore should not be included?
It would be notable if white NBA players don't normally do charity. Race isn't the lede, but it's a component that may make the story unique.
To take the basketball analogy further, "white basketball player makes slam dunk" would be a bad story, because yeah, we know white basketball players can dunk. But "white basketball player becomes all time NBA point leader" would be news-worthy, because it's unusual. What makes a story interesting or unique won't always be dramatic, but it may still be important to highlight.
I don't we should emphasize race in that way, when it's only relevant because "your race is less common in doing this thing". I don't want to see a headline like "white basketball player becomes all time NBA point leader". The race isn't important in that way.
That kind of thinking is what led to the self-fulfilling prophecy of slavery and racism against black people in the Americas in the first place -- the idea that they are less capable and it would therefore be surprising if they achieved something that the white man finds commonplace.
But these are different concepts. The bias of racism is one of erroneously assuming a person's capability based on something which has nothing to do with their actual capability. On the other hand, "emphasizing race" in a story can be used to point out the opposite of the above bias, in order to counter it.
If you've grown up all your life hearing the first bias, you may believe it. And then suddenly you see a story that refutes that bias, and you realize that actually, maybe the bias was wrong. Maybe it shouldn't be weird that this certain kind of person can do this certain kind of thing. It can take a lot of examples over a long period of time, but it works.
Countering the bias requires examples, and you have to actually publish those examples. If you never have stories that counter the bias, people literally just keep believing the bias. If in the 18th century nobody had ever put out stories about freedmen starting businesses, nobody would have believed that a freedman was capable of doing business. They needed those stories published just to change how people thought. That's the purpose of "black man becomes beekeeper" stories - to change perceptions, a little bit at a time.
That kind of story is useless if it's about something that everybody already knows and believes, but it's incredibly valuable if it fights a bias. This is the reason you don't see "white man becomes beekeeper" stories - we already know white people can be beekeepers. We don't all know the opposite. (If this sounds dumb, yes, I agree... but that's literally the kind of bias many people have, and this is how to counter it)
