Looting vs. Finding
New Orleans has only been underwater for a day or so, but I guess it’s never too early for hair-trigger charges of racism to surface. The latest meme is that Yahoo! News is racist because it reports that black people “loot” while white people “find” things. Blogger Dustin3000 displays the following picture and asks readers if they notice anything different between them:
I know, I know! The man in the first photo is holding a garbage bag full of junk, which is consistent with having entered into a store and looted it, while the man and woman depicted below hold only two items they reportedly found elsewhere. No? That’s not it? OK, how about this, then: the stories were written by two different news agencies, with different reporting policies, and those big racist meanies at Yahoo! had the gall to carry both companies’ feeds.
Using that strategy, of course, one can “prove” just about anything. Maybe now someone will “prove” Google News is run by a bunch of anti-Semites who think Israel is guilty of terrorism but Hamas and al-Qaeda are militants at worst, or freedom fighters, at best. It can’t be that hard to do; just locate one article written by al Jazeera, Indymedia or any of the other nutball organizations Google considers “news,” and two more from Reuters or the BBC.
UPDATE: Via commenter Geoff, Chris Graythen, the photographer who wrote the “finding” piece weighs in. Apparently, he chose the word “finding” rather than “looting” because … surprise of all surprises … that’s what he thinks happened:
I wrote the caption about the two people who ‘found’ the items. I believed in my opinion, that they did simply find them, and not ‘looted’ them in the definition of the word. The people were swimming in chest deep water, and there were other people in the water, both white and black. I looked for the best picture. there were a million items floating in the water – we were right near a grocery store that had 5+ feet of water in it. it had no doors. the water was moving, and the stuff was floating away. These people were not ducking into a store and busting down windows to get electronics. They picked up bread and cokes that were floating in the water. They would have floated away anyhow. I wouldn’t have taken in, because I wouldn’t eat anything that’s been in that water. But I’m not homeless. (well, technically I am right now.)
Never mind that, though. To the race pimps, all that matters is that one news agency accused a looter of looting, another news agency didn’t accuse two non-looters of looting, therefore, everyone’s a racist.
UPDATE x2: The offending page has now been “privatized,” which I assume is a euphemism for “taken down in embarrassment.” Nevertheless, the Idiette insists an apology is due – from the AP, of course, not from her.
UPDATE x3: Snopes muddies the waters further, alleging it is “true” that the news described a black guy as “looting” and two white guys as “finding.” They are reasonably clear on the fact that the AFP and the AP are two different news agencies, but you have to read their article carefully, thoroughly and a bit defensively to figure out the real issue: the black guy in one picture really was carrying a bag of stuff he almost certainly looted (AP photographer Dave Martin claims to have witnessed it), and the two white guys in the other really were holding two individual grocery items they almost certainly did not loot.
August 31st, 2005 at 10:00 am
Yeah, but AFP used “looting” in other captions.
August 31st, 2005 at 10:11 am
[...] Update: Oh dear. Katie notes that in the press coverage, black folks are looting while white folks are finding things. (update to the update: as Xrlq points out in comments, Yahoo! News used two different news agencies. Nothing to see here, keep moving.) Update to the update to the update: Xrlq blogs about it: the stories were written by two different news agencies, with different reporting policies, and those big racist meanies at Yahoo! had the gall to carry both companies
August 31st, 2005 at 10:21 am
Allah, this is a case of apples and oranges. It’s one thing to report on people “finding” goods that obviously weren’t theirs, which they personally may or may not have looted. It would be quite another to report generally that there had been widespread “finding” across the city.
Then again, who really cares if the Agence France Presse is raciste or not? Everything else about France sucks, why not that, too?
August 31st, 2005 at 10:43 am
It is indeed comic to see leftists trying to pin this on Yahoo News instead of AFP. Do they not know who writes the captions for these photos? Or does it simply not fit the narrative to blame the French?
I take your point about “finding,” X, but if the caption writer knew that the goods were from a grocery store, presumably the people who “found” them did too. In that case, I don’t see how it’s any different (except semantically) from looting. If I’m trudging down a street beside a Circuit City with the windows blown out, and a brand new TV comes floating by, I guess you could say I “found” it. But since I have a pretty good idea where it came from, and that it hasn’t been abandoned, isn’t it sort of … stealing?
I’m having flashbacks now to 1L Property class. I think I had this exact fact pattern for an exam question on trover.
August 31st, 2005 at 12:17 pm
This is a case for a little judgement – but not in the biblical sense. The only food anybody’s going to “find” there is what’s left on upper shelves of stores closed down by the storm.
If people are walkiing off with food, look the other way. If they’re walking off with jewelry and TV sets, throw the book at them.
August 31st, 2005 at 12:55 pm
What about “cleaning up” vs. “cleaning out?”
August 31st, 2005 at 3:13 pm
If you track back the photo to Getty Images, you find the same caption – apparently written by the photographer. Looks like AFP just licensed the photo from Getty and didn’t change the caption. The photographer may have racial issues, but I wouldn’t paint the entire media that way.
August 31st, 2005 at 6:31 pm
Just another silly attempt by the drama queen to generate a little traffic,
August 31st, 2005 at 9:21 pm
Chris Graythen, the New Orleans photographer who captioned the photo, responds to the ‘controversy’ in this thread: http://www.sportsshooter.com/message_display.html?tid=17204
September 1st, 2005 at 1:35 am
The overwhelming majority of New Orleans inhabitants are black, so odds are also quite good that any time there’s a picture with “looters” in the caption it’ll be someone black.
Show me a few dozen photos of white looters being described as simply “finding” things and I’ll be moved. One incident, especially one so ambiguous, means nothing. But if there’s a pattern we should see it.
September 1st, 2005 at 8:07 am
To the person pointing out the 1L property crap, you must not have gotten a lot of points on that trover question. Perishables floating in that water are probably abandoned goods since they will most likely spoil or be swept out to sea, and thus the store isn’t going to bother recovering it, the goods are not valuable enough. Also, the store itself was abandoned.
This is different from breaking windows, overpowering police and security guards, and taking expensive electronic items.
September 1st, 2005 at 9:04 am
Looting versus Finding, Another Take
Can’t we all just get along?!? Wonkette criticizes the AP for labeling a picture of African Americans as “looting” and juxtaposes it with another picture with white people “finding” stuff in New Orleans. XRLQ takes issue with Wonkette, pointing ou…
September 2nd, 2005 at 4:23 am
From Clinton,Mississippi….
Scream racist all you want. People stealing food because they have not eaten in 3 or 4 days with little or no water and zero relief effort in some areas, may be permissable. If you have no cash left and you are starving to death this is the only option left.
BUT…. shooting at medical helicopters to get all of their drugs for themselves or looting wal-mart for 60 inch plasma screen TV’s and 15 new pair of Nike shoes. And it just so happens that almost 100% of those people happen to be black. It’s not racism it is just a matter of fact. African Americans commit 98% of violent crimes in Mississippi. It is prob. similar in N.O. as well.
I wish everyone was the same color so that all the jerks would be exposed for what they are without some moron screaming racism. If everyone was the same color a lot of things that are tolerated now would never happen.
If you were here you could witness this travesty for yourselves as I have.
http://theclintonadministration.blogspot.com/
September 2nd, 2005 at 9:31 pm
Katrina Stupidity
PLEASE HELP
Jesus. Thanks (ahem) to Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred, I just read this bullshit at the idiotic Huffington Post:
It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive. Four days after the storm, …
September 3rd, 2005 at 5:00 pm
Ok…I think alot of this is close-minded. The fact remains that there are underlying – almost subliminal – messages in everything we watch. Let’s take the movie “Only the Strong” for example. It depicted the innocent and wonderfully diligent white man overcoming the evil black man. I know that the director probably wasn’t looking at it this way and most viewers won’t think of it this way, but if you see 10 movies showing basically the same thing (the urban African-American youth intimidating rich white Americans, for eg), eventually, it become ingrained in your subconscious that blacks are inherantly bad. Regardless of who took the pictures or who wrote the caption, the fact is that all racial groups in NO and everywhere else that is flooded are in the same position…take what you can or face starvation. To label one group fighting this frightening outcome as “looters” and the other group as “finders” will imprint some sort of racial message into the readers’ minds. I, so far, have seen no proof that the white people found the food floating OUTSIDE of the store or that the black people broke into a store to get those food items. For all I know, it could have been the other way around. This does not affect the fact that these labels were given to the international population. I believe that it was irresponsible reporting.
I cannot, however, blame Yahoo! for the reporting, but i DO think that it would have been in Yahoo!’s interest to properly review the captions before posting them.
September 3rd, 2005 at 6:19 pm
That leaves two possibilities: either you know something Chris Graythen doesn’t, or you aren’t paying attention.
September 4th, 2005 at 8:50 am
Now you are assuming because someone has a black plastic bag they are looters!!
How racist!!!!
September 4th, 2005 at 7:28 pm
So show me the evidence that the black ppl stole from inside a store and the white ppl found the food floating outside…
As far as I can tell, they could have both gotten the food from inside a store OR from food that ws just floating around. They said the white ppl were photographed near a grocery or something…doesn’t mean that they found the food then. Also, if it’s floating outside a GROCERY STORE, obviously, that’s where the food is from…the white ppl MUST know this… It’s not as if they are great hunters or trackers who just found this food anywhere…
September 4th, 2005 at 10:33 pm
OK, but first I’d like to show you the evidence you haven’t even looked carefully at the photos in question. In two straight comments, you’ve referred to the AP photo as depicting “people” (plural) when in fact it depicts only one individual. On top of that, your first comment described “them” (him) as having food items. Maybe he did, but you can’t tell that from the photo.
As to whether or not the guy in the AP photo actually looted his items (whatever they were), the strongest evidence, aside from the word of whoever wrote the caption, is the fact that his stuff filled up a garbage bag. Finding an individual item or two floating in the street is one thing, but the odds of finding an entire garbage bag full, along with the garbage bag itself? I don’t think anybody would be batting an eyelash over the AP photo and caption viewed in isolation. Do you?
As to the AFP photo, we see two people with two items between them, plus the word of the photographer who took the photo and wrote the caption, and doesn’t think anyone at the scene – black or white – entered the store at all. If there were any subtle racism here at all, it would be on the part of Chris Graythen for choosing to photograph two white finders instead of two black finders, or on the part of the AP photographer for zeroing in on one black looter rather than any of the white looters he may have encountered. Or it could be as simple as Graythen said it was on his end: he spent hours trying to get the best shot he could, and this was it.
Here’s the strongest evidence that everyone knows both captions are right: if either of the two photo/caption combinations had run and the other hadn’t, it wouldn’t have even occurred to anyone to protest about it.
September 5th, 2005 at 3:05 pm
I wouldn’t be too sure about that, which is why I have gone through the trouble of trying to identify classes of racist offense.
Being called a looter when you’re not, is a minor offense which I would call class 3. However this quickly escalated to the political point at which the governor Blanco felt it was OK to initiate a shoot to kill policy. The guys over at Volokh quickly and wisely showed that this was way beyond her, or anybody’s legal authority, and yet the myth persisted that it ought to be OK to shoot looters and set an example of ‘no tolerance’.
That’s when I piped up and said OK watch it because now there are machine guns in the streets, and it’s a shame that some people are receptive to a policy of shoot first ask questions later. If the aim is to restore law and order, people need to understand that it’s against the law to shoot looters.
It doesn’t take a degree in Civil Rights Law to understand when people are calling other people animals, that chaos isn’t only in the streets.
September 5th, 2005 at 3:17 pm
Right, but this post is about looting vs. finding, not what one should do about looting. The best evidence we have for each of the incidents depicted in the photo above is the eyewitness account of the photographer who took the photo. One claims to have witnessed the individual in question looting a store. The other claims to have witnessed grocery items floating all over the place, and didn’t see anyone entering the store. Unless/until someone can demonstrate that at least one of the two photographers is lying, the looting vs. finding bit is a non-issue. Whether Governor Blanco was right or wrong to order looters shot on sight is a totally separate issue, for which neither Yahoo!, the AP nor the AFP should be held responsible.
September 5th, 2005 at 5:12 pm
On point you’re absolutely right, and it’s a pitiful shame that people would lead with this weak jab thinking it’s a knockout.
September 6th, 2005 at 8:04 pm
Xrig…you’re a bloody idiot…I’m sorry to say. I think that reporting the white ppl as “finding” is wishful thinking and reporting the black people – oh…sorry…black PERSON – as “looting” is plain irresponsible. The same way you can argue that you don’t know what’s in the bag, I can argue that the person may have deemed it necessary to pack stuff in a bag (which the person may have brought for that person) because that person has others to feed…you are speculating as to the nature of both parties’ exploits and trying to use your speculation to debunk the fact that that is simply irresponsible reporting. I’m not saying that the photographers are racist…what I AM saying is that THE IMAGES CARRY RACIAL MESSAGES THAT ARE ALREADY INGRAINED IN OUR MINDS and as such perpetuate the same racial sterotypes and racist thinking that has you trying to defend the reporting.
September 6th, 2005 at 9:53 pm
Chau, let me see if I got this straight. You jump into this conversation with a strong opinion over a photo you haven’t even seen, ignore the eyewitness testimony of the two photographers who took the photos in question, and drone on about how the two news agencies shouldn’t have reported the news not because it isn’t true – you have no evidence of that whatsoever – but simply because it plays into your stereotypes about other people’s stereotypes. And all this makes me the idiot? I don’t fucking think so.
Frankly, you don’t impress me as someone interested in getting at the truth, but if I’m wrong, feel free to check out this thread, where you’ll see how I deal with real racists, as opposed to innocent photographers who are simply doing their jobs.
September 8th, 2005 at 11:45 am
Just want to put my two cents in.
Photographer believed one was looting and the other finding Given the nature of the situation though ‘looting’ or ‘finding’ maybe the editor not the photographer should bear some responsibility for not using the best possible vocabulary?
The photographer took pictures of people looting, finding, scavenging, whatever you want to call it. He gave it a label. The copy editor obviously didn’t know that this controversy would be created.
I just think this is really unfortunate and adds to fuel to the fire that both closet and openly racist people have and that are outside looking in.
To Chris: (The Photographer)
Keep doing your job buddy..
To the AP copy editors:
Don’t forget the power of what it is you do and just try to be a little more aware of the powder keg you’re sitting on. Otherwise..Keep doing your jobs too..we rely on you as part of the machinery that hopefully provides us with OBJECTIVE information.
September 8th, 2005 at 1:07 pm
Chau, I cannot begin to fathom how wise you are that you can formulate opinions of everything in less than 10 seconds! You are wise beyond your liberal years! I think I speak for all of us that have now been enlightened by your omniscient posts when I bow down before you, just enough for you to
Kiss my ass.
There are two different issues here:
1.) The subjectivity of the reporters
2.) The apparent (or non-existent) racism
On the subjectivity of the reporters, they certainly could’ve chosen better words. Journalists of all types are encouraged not to use words that include opinion, which they did. However, not being there ourselves, we depend on them to tell it like they saw it. If we don’t trust them to tell us what happened, then what’s the point of reading them in the first place?
On the point of racism, there isn’t any. I don’t care what you say, the “N” word was never used, two different journalists giving their angle of two different events.
September 9th, 2005 at 9:06 pm
WOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! GO YANKEES!!!!1!
September 15th, 2005 at 7:46 am
As a young welsh boy who lives thousasnds of miles away from the US of A, I feel truly sorry for the poor people of New Orleans and all the other towns and cities devastated by hurracane Katrina.
1. where was george “W” bush? was he sat around with his thumb up his ass? no, even worse, the imbacile was on holiday. he’s always on holiday and never at work.
2. the media is telling us that the blacks are looting and the whites are finding. they are all trying to survive. if the people of new orleans had electricity or newspapers there would, potentialy, be a race war.
3. why on god’s earth did bush send thousands upon thousands of troop’s down there? he has already got two or three wars going on, yet he still wants to waste the tax payer’s money. what the people of new orleans needed was docters, coast guards, people with boats and food not more idiots with guns.
there was a story on the news of some workers on a bridge and they got shot trying to do their jobs by some troopers who mistook them for looters.
4. 1 million people made homeless, thousands dead in china this week, yet no one gives a shit about them. its all to do with global warming. there has been a lot of news about the price of oil. you pay $4 a gallon yet over here we are now paying the equivalent of $10 a gallon.
in short, the media sucks, get rid of bush, stop the stupid gulf war 2 because it’s causing more harm than good, get rid of all your guns and stop using your cars so much. The world would be a much safer and enjoyable place to live.
Peace
September 15th, 2005 at 7:57 am
Good God, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a comment with that high of a canard-to-word ratio. Well done!
September 16th, 2005 at 7:24 am
Well put, Xrlg, or a comment with that high of mispelled-to-correctly-spelled word ratio.
Welshy- you truly are a naive “boy.” I love how as soon as disaster strikes, everyone looks to the President, as if Bush sent this plague upon New Orleans because he hated the town. If you could take anywhere near the crap any of our past and present presidents have then vent away. I guarantee, however, you would have a nervous breakdown because it’s so stressful.
Secondly, if you read anything in this article, you would know that the “surviving” you were talking about was getting necessary items such as bread, water, big screen TVs. Wait a minute, let’s think about that.
Thirdly, you have no idea about the inner-workings of New Orleans right now, you ignorant cuss. If you did, you would realize the vailidity in Bush sending troops there. Here, we have heard stories of gangs sniping ambulance and helicopter drivers and robbing stores because they are not protected. It’s a dog-eat-dog city, and the troops are trying to establish some kind of order.
In short, don’t state your unwelcome opinion until you’ve enlightened yourself on the subject more, welshy.
September 16th, 2005 at 9:14 am
That’s assuming he really is Welsh, which I doubt. His IP is in Amsterdam, which suggests he probably is in Europe right now, but his overall comment reads like the rant of an American moonbat, not his British counterpart. Brits write “ass” when they they mean a donkey or a stupid person, but “arse” when they mean the part of the body someone might stick his thumb into. As to the substance of his hallucinations, since when do Brits care if an American President wastes the money of American taxpayers? And have you ever heard from a British ‘Bat who is as rabidly opposed to George W. Bush as this guy is but can’t be bothered to say a single word about Tony Blair?