It’s Not Looting If You’re White

My friend Adam pointed me towards another example of egregious racism in the mainstream press: the captions on photos of looters in New Orleans. Both pictures show residents of New Orleans wading through chest-deep flood waters, carrying various goods. According to the two AP captions, in the first photograph a young black man is returning from “looting a grocery store”; the caption of the second photograph (which shows a white couple) says simply that they are returning from “finding bread and soda” in a “local grocery store.”

Salon.com also has an article about the photographs of looters.