As a worried nation looks to the recent past for signs of how Houston’s future might play out, blistering critiques of media coverage during Hurricane Katrina are making the rounds on social media.
The archival record of choice may surprise you. It’s The Onion:
NEW ORLEANS—Throughout the Gulf Coast, Caucasian suburbanites attempting to gather food and drink in the shattered wreckage of shopping districts have reported seeing AfricanAmericans “looting snacks and beer from damaged businesses.” “I was in the abandoned Wal-Mart gathering an air mattress so I could float out the potato chips, beef jerky, and Budweiser I’d managed to find,” said white survivor Lars Wrightson, who had carefully selected foodstuffs whose salt and alcohol content provide protection against contamination. “Then I look up, and I see a whole family of [African-Americans] going straight for the booze. Hell, you could see they had already looted a fortune in diapers.” Radio stations still in operation are advising store owners and white people in the affected areas to locate firearms in sporting-goods stores in order to protect themselves against marauding blacks looting gun shops.
The New York Times played it straight when tackling the same issue. In 2005, the paper analyzed two photographs of Katrina survivors, both of which are also recirculating now. The first was an Associated Press photo of a black man, chest deep in flood water, with soda and a floating bag. It was captioned, “looting a grocery store.” The second was distributed by Agence France-Presse for Getty Images, and showed a white couple wading through similarly filthy water, but noted the photo was taken “after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store.”
So you can imagine the online debate that erupted yesterday after this tweet from Tom Llamas, an anchor and correspondent from ABC News:
#Breaking We're witnessing looting right now at a large supermarket in the NE part of Houston & police have just discovered a body nearby
— Tom Llamas (@LlamasNBC) August 29, 2017
There was quite a bit of salty talk in the back and forth, but beloved wrestler MVP managed to return fire by framing the issue succinctly.
I've noticed during disasters that some people "loot" grocery stores for food, others "scavenge". What's the difference?
@TomLlamasABC— MVP (@The305MVP) August 29, 2017
The general consensus: If you’re white, it’s not looting.
The difference in recovery efforts, at least, is something that the NAACP is planning to monitor. NAACP interim President Derrick Johnson has said the organization will be watching relief efforts closely, “to ensure that resources directed from the federal government don’t skip neighborhoods.”
Black neighborhoods are used to being skipped, a process that begins long before the levees break. “Katrina was not an equal opportunity storm,” explains Gary Rivlin from Talk Poverty, a project of The Center for American Progress. “A black homeowner in New Orleans was more than three times as likely to have been flooded as a white homeowner. That wasn’t due to bad luck; because of racially discriminatory housing practices, the high-ground was taken by the time banks started loaning money to African Americans who wanted to buy a home.” Only one in three black New Orleanians who fled Katrina’s path were able to return, he says.
We’re going to spend the coming years watching a post-Harvey Houston rebuild, and deeply-rooted inequities will inevitably emerge. We will have to take a long look at them – and also ourselves. We live in a world where wrestlers and anchors and the rest of us regular folks are consuming, evaluating, amplifying, and commenting on news and images that we may not fully understand, and our biases occasionally take over. Who we call a looter, and why we do so, really matters.
One thing that’s true now that wasn’t 10 years ago is that more people seem to feel more comfortable calling out these disparities when they see them. It’s essential that they do. Being black and brown in America is a complicated bit of business even on a sunny day. But in times of crisis, biases can prove deadly, particularly for people who don’t ever get the systemic benefit of the doubt. The wrong label casually slapped into a tweet or onto a photo can leave a permanent scar on both the individual and a community, and at the worst possible time.
Ellen McGirt writes Fortune’s raceAhead, a daily newsletter about race and culture.
On Point
| General Mattis puts transgender ban on hold |
| The Defense Secretary announced late yesterday that serving transgender troops will be allowed to stay in the military for now, pending the results of a Pentagon-approved study. "Once the panel reports its recommendations and following my consultation with the secretary of Homeland Security, I will provide my advice to the president concerning implementation of his policy direction," Mattis said in a statement. The ban doesn’t begin until March, 2018, so the hope is that this stall is not a search for a justification of the order. |
| USA Today |
| “The Nashville Statement” is dividing Christians on the issues of homosexuality and gender identity |
| Yesterday, The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) issued a statement that sent a warning shot to evangelical Christian congregations who are inclusive of gay and transgender people. In a series of 13 Articles, the organization affirms marriage to be between one man and one woman, and denies "that adopting a homosexual or transgender self-conception is consistent with God’s holy purposes in creation and redemption.” Of particular issue is Article 10, which disavows the “agree to disagree” position that has allowed many denominations to recognize gay or transgender Christians. |
| CBMW |
| Mastercard is using data to help governments and non-profits |
| Mastercard is experimenting with a form of “data donation,” a project from its independent subsidiary, the Center for Inclusive Growth. Sitting on an enormous dataset of global payment information, the company believes that its data philanthropy program, which offers “data grants” to governments, NGOs, and other agencies, can give them the information they need to build better social good products and services. “[T]hink about Mastercard’s assets broadly, and then think about how those assets can be applied for social good,” Shamina Singh, the Center’s president, told Fast Company. |
| Fast Company |
The Woke Leader
| Nazis love Taylor Swift |
| This may be the best opening salvo of any article ever written: “Every demographic chooses a pop icon. Gay men worship Cher, black women love Beyoncé, and neo-Nazis worship Taylor Swift, a skinny, blonde Pennsylvania girl that they have labeled an "’Aryan Goddess.’" So begins this tragic and dangerous tale of white supremacist obsession that may have simply started with a bored teen who had a need to meme. |
| The Atlantic |
| Here’s why there are Jeff Davis Highways everywhere |
| After Virginia decided to rename its Jefferson Davis Highway, one of its most famous state roads, other people from non-Confederate places like Arizona and Washington State remembered that they too had Jeff Davis byways of their own. Blame the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a dedicated group of secessionist descendants working in the 1910s, who created a campaign to pitch and help pay for a national highway system dedicated to the memory of their Southern hero back when the municipalities were struggling to upgrade their country roads. |
| The Atlantic |
| Turns out, the wrestler MVP is a pretty interesting guy |
| He introduced himself in this video as Hassan Assad, a “world renowned professional wrestler, which basically means that I play fight in spandex for a living.” The occasion was a debate event in which incarcerated students from Lee College Huntsville Center competed against the Texas A&M University Speech & Debate team. And Assad had some things to say about smart talk. Assad ended up in prison at 16, running the streets in Miami – guns, drugs and gangs - and faced a possible 18-year sentence. “A lot of people wrote me off as dead,” he said. “One of the things that I learned was that the ability to be an effective communicator… that’s the key to your success in life,” he said. It's really good. Oh, and guess who won? |
| YouTube |
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