Irresponsible editing and hate
Toula Drimonis spotted an egregious bit of captioning this week by QMI. A photo of some young people in a line, pre-Covid – taken in 2008 or so – was headlined “Les gangs de rue profitent de la PCU” (Street gangs benefit from the CERB) and the caption says “Des membres de gangs de rue, il y a quelques jours, dans le métropole.”
Nothing made these young people street gang members except that, in the eye of some at QMI, anyone with brown skin is automatically suspect.
François Legault, this is your systemic racism, right here: the automatic assignment of suspicion – ingrained, unquestioned, a knee-jerk reaction – to the sight of people with skin darker than one’s own. It runs through other societies than ours, yes, but it’s prevalent enough here that a page editor at the Journal felt safe in taking an old archive photo and labelling the people shown as criminals.
Meezly 09:07 on 2021-04-01 Permalink
A very observant article. But disappointing that it omitted the media trend of slugging in stock photos of masked Asian people for Covid-19 related online articles. It’s the accumulated association of image + content that keeps reinforcing stereotypes and biases.