NBC News has a lengthy feature story on a dispute between the Standing Rock Sioux and an outside linguistic group studying the Lakota language:

The Lakota Language Consortium had promised to preserve the tribe’s native language and had spent years gathering recordings of elders. . . . But when [Ray] Taken Alive, 35, asked for copies, he was shocked to learn that the consortium, run by a white man, had copyrighted the language materials, which were based on generations of Lakota tradition. The traditional knowledge gathered from the tribe was now being sold back to it in the form of textbooks. [Emphasis added.]

The story profiles the co-founder and chief linguist of the consortium, who are, respectively, Austrian and Czech immigrants. The latter is described thus:

Ullrich grew up in the Czech Republic, and in the 1980s he joined a group of white hobbyists who appropriated Indigenous culture by dressing up as Native Americans, living in tipis and smoking peace pipes, which was captured in a 1995 documentary. After spending several years studying Lakota, Ullrich first visited the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1992. He has spent his summers in the Dakotas working on a new Lakota dictionary and teaching since. [Emphasis added.]

Now, the fact that this is a dispute with an outsider who is not Lakota and, in fact, not a Native American is understandably significant. The biographical detail on where the two men are from adds some color. But what, exactly, is added to this story by saying “white man”? If these were black men, Jews, Muslims, Koreans, whatever, would NBC make the same choice? Even if the text of the story did so, would it put the race of the linguists in the headline, as it does here? “Lakota elders helped a white man preserve their language. Then he tried to sell it back to them.” [Emphasis added.] There is no legitimate journalistic reason to do that; it is simply an effort to stoke racial resentment.