Looting v finding....

grumpytrousers · 31-08-2005 11:13am #1

Black people "loot" whereas white people "find".

RuggieBear · 31-08-2005 11:16am

this is floating around AH at the moment

flogen · 31-08-2005 11:32am

that's pretty funny, although as the discussion on AH points out, not racist

whiskeyman · 31-08-2005 12:14pm

was watching this on CBS nightly news and they never showed one white person on it.... except for the police officers with shotguns trying to stop the looters.
Some of it was off the scale - people taking whole shop shelves with the goods still on them.
However, you could clearly see others just taking a bottle or two of water (probably essentials due to the state of emergency).
All classed as "looters" though.

Brendan552004 · 31-08-2005 1:11pm

Watch the looters live on New Orleans TV.

http://www.wwltv.com/perl/common/video/wmPlayer.pl?title=beloint_khou&props=livenoad

vibe666 · 31-08-2005 1:16pm

not being funny, but whatever you call it, it's people with no other options trying to survive on goods that are basically unfit for resale due to flood damage anyway. if i was there, i'd be doing the same thing as i'm sure most other people would too.

when the cleanup operations moves from corpses to cleaning up and repairing shops and homes, 99% of what's there will be disposed of anyway, so wheres the problem, black or white? p.s. i know the story isn't about the morality, but you get what i mean.
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grumpytrousers · 31-08-2005 2:25pm

vibe666 wrote:

not being funny, but whatever you call it, it's people with no other options trying to survive on goods that are basically unfit for resale due to flood damage anyway. if i was there, i'd be doing the same thing as i'm sure most other people would too.

when the cleanup operations moves from corpses to cleaning up and repairing shops and homes, 99% of what's there will be disposed of anyway, so wheres the problem, black or white? p.s. i know the story isn't about the morality, but you get what i mean.
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The point I was getting at (and I'm sure the one being got at over on AH) is the presentation of virtually identical facts - people *ahem* borrowing stuff 'cos they have no other choice; I have no problem with this...

The implication in the caption with the black person is that they're 'loot', and with the white couple is that they 'found' the food...

Meself - i tend to judge looters by what they appropriate, not their skin colour. You 'find' food, you 'loot' a colour television...

vibe666 · 31-08-2005 3:32pm

don't get me wrong, i wasn't having a go, and i get where you're coming from.

like you say, i didn't see anyone on the news lifting plasma TV's out of shop windows, it was all about survival.
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steviec · 31-08-2005 4:18pm

Two completely unconnected articles written by different people use two slightly different phrases but convey the same overall meaning and one happens to contain a photo of a black person while the other contains a photo of a white person. If I'd read them separately I never would have noticed, even with people nitpicking and bringing it to your attention its not particularly noteworthy. Just an excuse to cry 'racism' when there is none.

raxall · 01-09-2005 12:14am

haha thats funny

01-09-2005 9:41am

steviec wrote:

Two completely unconnected articles written by different people use two slightly different phrases but convey the same overall meaning and one happens to contain a photo of a black person while the other contains a photo of a white person. If I'd read them separately I never would have noticed, even with people nitpicking and bringing it to your attention its not particularly noteworthy. Just an excuse to cry 'racism' when there is none.

It's suggestive of a prevalent way of thinking, particularly in the US media. The fact that one person would see black people and think 'looters', another person see white people and thinks 'finders' points to a particular mindset of a population. It's by no means conclusive, and should be taken in context. If you were to go back over all news reports of situations where black people were doing something similar to a white person and the black person was getting villified for it, and you found a large number of them, that would tell you a lot

grumpytrousers · 01-09-2005 9:50am

steviec wrote:

Two completely unconnected articles written by different people use two slightly different phrases but convey the same overall meaning and one happens to contain a photo of a black person while the other contains a photo of a white person. If I'd read them separately I never would have noticed, even with people nitpicking and bringing it to your attention its not particularly noteworthy. Just an excuse to cry 'racism' when there is none.

The "slightly different" phrases are more than "slightly different".

Looting implies illegal behaviour. Finding doesn't.

From Wikipedia....

to loot

to steal, especially as part of war, riot or other group violence.

to find (finds, finding, found)

To encounter, to discover.

Hobbes · 01-09-2005 9:51am

There have been reports of police looting as well. Shots fired at police for doing it, most of the police force has quit and its turning into a real warzone.

whiskeyman · 01-09-2005 12:47pm

Hobbes wrote:

most of the police force has quit and its turning into a real warzone.

I guess that makes sense. People officers are just people at the end of the day, and their homes have probably been affected and many had already evacuated hence the reason they've "quit", but I'd say they've mostly taken some kind of exceptional leave.
This is where the national guard should be in picking up the pieces in the aftermath.

Where'd you see the reports of police looting? Were they dressed as police officers or off duty?

Hobbes · 01-09-2005 1:01pm

See my other post. Blog report.

Victor · 02-09-2005 6:15am

whiskeyman wrote:

People officers are just people at the end of the day, and their homes have probably been affected

"Thin blue line"?

pH · 02-09-2005 2:07pm

Hang on a sec I just reread the quotes and something is fishy

http://www.flickr.com/photos/triciawang/38922728/

"Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store..."

does the word finding not seem out of place here.

After all who "finds" ... "from"
"Takes from", "loots from", etc, but "finds in" is the correct usage surely.

It reads more like a late edit, I guess if this was a hoax it would have been denied by now, so it looks that whoever wrote that article(or perhaps their editor) was using a different word which was replaced by "finding", even though the sentance no longer scans.

[edit]
I guess I just misread it - they found bread "from" a grocery store. Implying that the bread was outside(from) the grocery store and they found it.

Hobbes · 02-09-2005 2:20pm

actually there is another photo of two white people "finding stuff" but different news agency again.

billy the squid · 02-09-2005 11:23pm

the image of the white people "finding"has been removed at the request of AFP

http://news.yahoo.com/photo/050830/photos_ts_afp/050830071810_shxwaoma_photo1

yahoo news statement
http://news.yahoo.com/page/photostatement

CivilServant · 14-09-2005 12:46am

flogen wrote:

that's pretty funny, although as the discussion on AH points out, not racist

Can you link that thread please, i can't find it.

With regard to the captions, definitely racist. Subconscious media racism at it's worst. Insidious because you have to line up these two particular pictures to understand. Who knows that similar "media" slants there've been against people of colour. Countless I imagine, to dismiss this story out of hand would be callous.

More disscussion here

flogen · 14-09-2005 2:08am

CivilServant wrote:

Can you link that thread please, i can't find it.

With regard to the captions, definitely racist. Subconscious media racism at it's worst. Insidious because you have to line up these two particular pictures to understand. Who knows that similar "media" slants there've been against people of colour. Countless I imagine, to dismiss this story out of hand would be callous.

More disscussion here

I'm afraid not at the moment as the search function is down and the thread is from more than a week ago (which is many pages deep in AH terms).

The reason I don't consider it racist is because it's two different news agencies and two different writers. The two companies may well have different editorial policies, perhaps one is harder (refering to these people as looters) and the other understands that these people were desperate and cannot be classed as criminals or labeled as such.
If it were even the same agency I'd consider it racist, but it's not.

Look at it this way, let's say two terrorists kill 20 people in two seperate attacks, one is white and the other is asian. Both kill in the name of the same God and give the same reasons etc.. ITV reports on the Asian mans attack and says "terrorist kills 20 people". BBC reports on the white mans attack and say "man kills 20 people". Is this racist? No, it's just that the BBC (controversially) refuse to label people as terrorists as part of their editorial policy.

Looting v finding....

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