Matters of race enter into Katrina perspectives

By Robert Gutsche Jr

Saturday, September 3, 2005 2:03 AM CDT

News reporters have shown us what happens when houses are hit by 180 mph winds, as they did when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast this week.

We've watched New Orleans streets flood and bodies be recovered from wastelands of timber and filth. And we've watched the masses of hungry and homeless cry for help.

But beyond what we have seen, there is a story of race in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast that - for the most part - has been overlooked in the American media. It's the story of race and disaster.

"All you are really seeing is the looting and the reports of shootings, carjackings and people breaking into businesses," said Ken Lumpkin, publisher of The Insider, a local newspaper that primarily serves the black community. "When you see pictures like this, how do you look at your fellow neighbors in Racine and Milwaukee? Do you look at them and compare them to what's happening in New Orleans?" Race makes it into story Here are two examples of how the media have represented race on TV and in the papers:

* Two different photographs came across electronic wires Thursday, showing basically the same things - people who appear to be stealing things from stores or the flooded streets. An Associated Press photo of a young, black man carrying a case of Pepsi and a filled garbage bag through chest-high water held a caption describing his "looting." A caption of a second photo, this time from AFP/Getty Images, described a white man "finding" things like bread and soda and wading through water.

* And one cable network on Friday cut from a briefing by national black leaders objecting to news media coverage of the "looting" of stores and homes throughout the Gulf Coast. They said the media aren't paying enough attention to what they considered a slow response from the government to the emergency. The cable channel switched, while one of the speakers was in mid-sentence, to a white Pentagon spokesperson talking about rebuilding the levees that broke, which sent surging waters into much of the already devastated area.

Racial divide There have been other issues, too, with the way race has been represented in stories about the poor, minorities and the disaster, according to local and state race and media leaders.

Blacks make up nearly 68 percent of the population in New Orleans, and 23 percent of the city is under the poverty level. Yet, major media sources were slow in covering this aspect of the tragedy until Friday, leaving viewers and readers with a poor understanding all week of the situation down South, said Hemant Shah, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin- Madison.

And even when the stories came out, he said, there were few.

"Part of the problem is when something like this happens, people mobilize quickly, including journalists, and in an ideal circumstance, all reporters would have had a thorough knowledge of the racial makeup of the city," he said. "If that local knowledge had been there, then the AP reporter, whoever wrote those cutlines, may have avoided it."

Local, national concerns Some local activists, including Wally Rendon, are concerned that the lack of coverage so far, especially of race and the economics in the South, could fuel negative stereotypes in Racine, where 20 percent of the population is black and 13 percent of the city's population lives in poverty.

"The impact that can have or may have is that for those people that already have that bias it reinforces a `see I told you,' type of attitude when in reality that's not necessarily the case," he said.

He's not alone in his concern.

Several black members of Congress expressed anger Friday in Washington, D.C., at what they said was a slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina, while representatives from national black groups charged that the government response to the disaster was slow because those most affected are poor.

Yet, not all were ready to blame race.

"The issue is not about race right now," said U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio. "There will be another time to have issues about color."

Photo controversy But the debate over race, sparked particularly from the wording in captions about "looting," created online buzz throughout the journalism industry at the week's end.

Looting has become a serious problem in parts of the Gulf Coast. Police and National Guard members have tried to keep order, yet hundreds of people have broken into stores or stolen from others. There have also been several instances of violence.

Still, many journalists said late this week the "looting" photos that emerged Thursday were insensitive and racist.

In response to inquiries from newspapers, AP Director of Photography Santiago Lyon says the national news cooperative explains its references to "looting" this way: "When we see people go into businesses and come out with goods we call it looting. When we just see them carrying things down the road, we call it carrying items."

Journal Times Editor Randolph D. Brandt has taken it further.

"I've instructed our News Desk to change references to `looting' in picture captions to `taking,' and let readers draw their own conclusion from the context," Brandt said. "I can't know whether somebody taking battery-powered tools from a ruined hardware store is `looting,' or trying to find something he can use to get Grandma out of the attic, fix his boat or knock together a temporary

shelter.

"We're not there. We shouldn't judge."

Not focused on race Honey Reneau, president of the Urban League of Racine and Kenosha, said her group locally and nationally has not been focused on race in the media.

"We had a conference call" with other national Urban League groups on Friday "and we did discuss how some are trying to make this a race issue," she said.

"We are trying to be real positive because there are a million people without homes down there, so we are not really talking about the race issues."

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