"Who's a looter?"

“Who’s a Looter?”
This article by Tania Ralli shows two different pictures both taken of hurricane Katrina survivors. One picture shows a young black man carrying food and pop with a caption underneath that suggests he was looting a grocery store. The second picture shows a white couple also carrying food and drink but the caption under this photo says they found bread and water. When I started reading this article, I immediately agreed with the bloggers who thought that the difference between the two captions was a purposefully made racial statement. To me, the young black man and the white couple were doing the exact same thing; they were both in the middle of a crisis and were doing what they could to get the resources they needed to survive. It is kind of ironic that the caption under the black man had more of a negative vibe to it than the caption under the picture of the white couple. As I continued to read, I realized that the two photos came from completely different agencies. I then agreed that the negative statement under the picture of the black man probably wasn’t meant to come across the way it did when compared to the same type of photo from another agency. The two agencies claim to have different standards on how they write their captions, which makes the incident seem even more unintentional.
Many times things that are not truly racial issues tend to be portrayed as racial issues by critics and/or society. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes certain situations are racial issues and need to be dealt with, but I’m not sure that is the case here with this article. This article controversy reminds me of that shooting that happened in Lima a year or so ago. There was a somewhat of a huge uproar about whether it was a racial issue or not. I never saw it as a racial issue and I know many people, black and white, who felt the same way. At times, a situation is what you make it out to be. Would there be the same level of questioning with these photos if the caption under the white couple claimed that they were looting, and the caption under the black man had more of a positive connotation? I think sometimes people make a big deal out of something that is not intended to be such a big deal. I think it would be awesome if people could just see people as people; not white or black or Mexican or any other ethnicity. If people could look at one another through a colorless lens, I think the world would be a very different place.