This story and headline is a perfect example of how racist politics and narratives are subtly deployed in media. Blink and you miss it. On Thursday, a man killed four children in an attack inside a nursery school in the Ugandan capital of Kampala on Thursday. It was the most horrific attack on a kindergarten school in Uganda in recent memory. The attacker “brutally stabbed and killed four juveniles,” with a knife police said. Nearly all Uganda media reports said the murderer used a knife. However, in AP’s telling, he became a “machete wielding” attacker. It doesn’t make the tragedy any less, but the the word "machete" often carries cultural baggage in Western (and sometimes global) media framing. It often evokes images of chaotic violence in tropical or African settings –think the "wild savage" trope from colonial-era storytelling –more readily than a "knife" does for similar attacks elsewhere. And thus it conjures up an image of Kampala, or Uganda for that matter, as a place with menacing “natives” walking around with deadly machetes, rather than an individual who might be been mentally ill. Surprising how strong the instinct to fall back on these tropes remains.