Blacks Loot, Whites Find: Katrina, Race, and Word Choice

I think it was Wednesday night when we first noticed it; Amanda and I were sitting on the couch having gotten the packing for our Florida trip squared away, and we’re trying to catch whatever coverage we can find of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath.  We’ve known the love of TiVo for over five years, so we’re blissfully unaware of most of the television sprawl, so we had no idea who CNN’s Nancy Grace was when her show began to air.  She’s older than the typical CNN I-was-a-model-but-decided-to-try-broadcasting talking head, so I figured that she must either know something or have a shtick.  I’m still not sure about the former but I quickly got convinced about the latter.  She began by interviewing Anderson Cooper, who was standing in the rubble of coastal Mississippi, the storm-tossed wreckage of a floating casino behind him in the middle of a parking lot.  Maybe “interviewing” is the wrong word … Ms. Grace seemed nearly manic with the news that martial law had been declared --- where she didn’t specify --- and she would occasionally pause her nearly frantic comments about looters to tell Mr. Cooper to get away from that barge before hordes descended on it and killed him for being nearby.  And while she was honestly appearing to Amanda and myself like a woman with a personality disorder, we noticed that the same ten second clip was looping almost the entire time:  various shots of black people looting what appeared to be a super market.

Now, I believe that stealing is wrong, but let me make clear that there’s a difference between looting for survival and looting for profit.  In fact, “looting” is the wrong verb in the former case, because the root of the term comes from the Sanskrit for “plunder,” as in a time of war.  People running away with television sets after a natural disaster may not meet the wartime criterion, but I agree that the term fits there.  But stealing baby formula and bottled water?  When the store is already waist-high with contaminated water in a city that’s drowning?  

But it’s still stealing, my inner voice says, and yes, it is, but for Reason’s sake look at the circumstances.  Do you think that super market they’re taking those items from is insured?  I’d bet it is.  And do you think that if any of those items were recovered they’d had a chance in Hell of being resold?  No, because I don’t think that any retailer has a “Soaked for days in sewer water” discounted item display.  Those items are already a write-off.  Now put your and your family in their place.  If everything around me looked like the aftermath of Noah’s flood for as far as the eye could see, and there was no sign of the government or military supplying aid or even direction, you can bet that I’d break down the door and steal a few cans of formula, even though stealing is wrong.  If doing the right thing means watching my infant son starve to death, I’ll take the damn formula and bottled water too.

Amanda and I couldn’t take more than five minutes of Nancy Grace, so we switched to MSNBC and wrote her off as a minor wacko, but over the next few days we saw similar depictions.  All looters were evil, regardless of what they were taking.  That is, until we saw a photo of two white people who “found” their supplies.  Now, to his credit the photographer who captured that moment said that the groceries were floating out of the store so the white folks didn’t have to enter the building, but this pattern of media coverage still stinks like the inside of the Super Dome.  Context in journalism, just like in real life, cannot and must not be ignored.  In circumstances less desperate, stealing is stealing … period.  But in this apocalyptic event, when a major city floats like a bloated and decaying corpse, stealing supplies isn’t; it’s survival.  And that’s the truth no matter what color your skin happens to be.