The other day I was discussing Hurricane Katrina and Kanye West's famous quote "George Bush doesn't care about black people," and something suddenly came back to my memory. One of the first stories that hit my home town (Seattle) appeared on the front page with a huge picture of people trying to find food in a flooded grocery store. The photo features two black males with grocery items in their hands, looking around as though they had done something wrong. Later in the article there was a picture of a few white people with the same amount of grocery items in their hands trying to sift through the water.
Unintentionally or not, the article made it seem as though the black men had just stolen from the grocery store and that white people had not. In actuality, both groups of people had taken from the grocery store in hopes of feeding their families for survival in the aftermath of a huge natural disaster. This made me question whether or not the editor of this paper realized what he or she had allowed to be published. The photos were an indirect example of the very racism Kanye West mentioned. It was appalling that a photo of such derogatory connotation was allowed to be published and distributed.
(I can’t recall which newspaper it came from and I haven’t been able to find it online. If anyone has any idea please let me know. I do know that it was one of the first articles that came out after the hurricane).
1 comment:
You have raised one of very most interesting questions about both stories and photographs. Whatever the "frame" -- a front page; a single story; a year's worth of pix and stories -- is there balance that reflects the underlying facts. This awareness is particularly necessary during disasters where people, uh, misbehave.
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