Weirdest Racial Tensions on my Flickr Post

finding-looting
Originally uploaded by triciawang.

So see my post from 2 days ago about the discrepancy in photo captions about New Orleans post-hurricane? After I posted it to my Flickr site and my blog, as of right now that picture has had 28,000 views along with a real-tim intense racial commentary war taking. Sistablak42has just accused rugyplayer42of being an ignorant white guy andrugbyplayerthinks the victims in New Orleans are "morons" that the police should just shoot if caught looting.

DAMNNNNNNN! America has some SERIOUS racial issues to work out.

I posted this picture not to CLAIM Racism. These photographs were taken by 2 different photographer, in two different situations and captioned by 2 different copy-editors. Had the 2 pictures been taken by the same photographer AND captioned by the same copy editor, then the racial motives behind the copy-editor's word choice could be equivocated.

What's interesting about the the juxtapostion of these two photos is that when compared, one can see how word choice can greatly affect the way a viewer extricates meaning from an image. The nature of comparing 2 items in an analytical world is just that - to get you to critically analyze the photos and astutely pull out larger themes that give insight to other topics that otherwise wouldn't be as apparent.

To inculpate the 2 photographers, 2 copyeditors, and American media for being racist, is not the most cogent claim in this situation.