People took food from a supermarket

in Concepción on Sunday."

So this slide (#7) is captiioned in the New York Times slide show that is front and center.*

These people are white.

The black people in Haiti are looters.

When this sort of photo captioning was brought up by us as media critics >!< at the Haiti teach-in, it brought gasps from the audience. In later write ups for the paper and departmental reports -- departments sent representatives to take 'minutes,' this was cited again and again as a radical observation. Though no one, so far, has bothered to attempt refutations of such observations as false or wrong.

We brought this up as a parallel of reportage from New Orleans when the levees broke and people were going without food, water, shelter etc. for weeks also. Foraging for supplies by the desperate black survivors was constantly labeled as looting, and the television nets looped a couple of scenes from Canal Street endlessly, while further uptown, where white people broke into a Whole Foods, that was called 'foraging.' Nor were there television clips or newspaper photos of that.

But we know certainly that white people did break into the Whole Foods there because we stayed at the apartment of one of them for the 2006 Mardi Gras, and she told us many stories of how she and her friends walked down to the Whole Foods every day to get water and so on. Other white people we know told us the same stories.

In the meantime, in the HuffPo, a DOCTOR writes this to illustrate how little we in the U.S. know about Haiti:

It is no accident that there are no trees on the Haitian side of the island of Hispaniola while the Costa Rican side is lush and tropical.

So tell us, what is wrong with this statement?

* ETA: It may be necessary to overtly state that my heart also goes out to the people of Chile, who have suffered such a terrible disaster, and whose suffering is just beginning.


I'm also at the moment listening to national public rhetoric: the hourly news update has just called the people of Chile looking for food LOOTERS, and reports that the police are turning water hoses and so on, to prevent people from LOOTING. Would it be ignorant to presume these LOOTERS are the Chileans who are, um poor, and maybe of mixed race, or Indio, or black or, well, poor.