Racist Hurricane Coverage?
These two captions to photos of hurricane survivors gathering groceries is getting a lot of play in the blogosphere.
Here's the first one:
Here's the second:
See the difference? The first caption says that the black kid is "looting" the groceries. The second says that the white people are "finding" the groceries.
Evidence of racism, unconscious or otherwise? I don't think so. The photos are from two entirely separate news bureaus. Which means that two different people in two different offices wrote the captions. And people use words differently. There's nothing sinister about it.
If we were talking about the same person writing both of these captions, or even both captions coming from the same news wire, then there might be an argument here for racism. As it is, this is all much ado about nothing.
And as far as "looting" goes, lets remember that there's a difference between looting for food and supplies and looting for DVD players and wide-screen televisions.
Here's the first one:
Here's the second:
See the difference? The first caption says that the black kid is "looting" the groceries. The second says that the white people are "finding" the groceries.
Evidence of racism, unconscious or otherwise? I don't think so. The photos are from two entirely separate news bureaus. Which means that two different people in two different offices wrote the captions. And people use words differently. There's nothing sinister about it.
If we were talking about the same person writing both of these captions, or even both captions coming from the same news wire, then there might be an argument here for racism. As it is, this is all much ado about nothing.
And as far as "looting" goes, lets remember that there's a difference between looting for food and supplies and looting for DVD players and wide-screen televisions.
