Racial Bias in Action

Boing Boing: Black people loot, white people find?

Boing Boing points to a couple similar photos of flood survivors dragging boxes of food through the water. In the photo depicting an African American, the person is "looting" but in the photo depicting a white person they are "finding" the food from a grocer store. Nice. They go on to show an AP Photo of a white man "looking through his shopping bag" as he leaves a looted store.

This kind of thing bums me out. I mean, this whole thing going on in New Orleans is totally nuts. It's complete devastation down there. There is much to be done. Reporting like this only adds to the problem.

posted by brendoman | 08/31/05| 03:07:58 am| In the News|

1 comment

Comment from: hundiejo [Member] · http://hundiejo.com

Yup, I agree. But then again, I have always been impressed (sic) with the bias that photo captions get away with. Rueters, esp.

On another note. If you see more pictures of black looters that any other race, it should be expected. New Orleans is 70% black. If 10% of the population are looters, you should (with an even racial distribution) expect 7 out of 10 looters to be black. It is not that “blacks are looters” just that there is a larger percentage of the population is black and you should expect more of the looters to be black because of that.

08/31/05 @ 12:50

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Racial Bias in Action

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