No Easy Fix to Prejudice

Some things are just easier said than done. Take Professor Ray Chavez’s talk in class today for example, that the way to go in stopping your biases from developing into irrational prejudices is to take a step back, acknowledge that you do have inherent biases and work to correct them!

Tell that to a person with long held prejudices against a different race, gender or sexual orientation. That prescription will probably not work much in changing their views. Most of the prejudices are said to happen outside a persons’ conscious awareness—almost automatically—and the case of the Media and coverage of Hurricane Katrina is a poignant example.

While journalist is by training and by the demands of the profession asked to remain as accurate and impartial as possible, they failed to combat racial biases in this case.

Long-held stereotypes about black people activated this image of them as looting criminals—even at the times of desperate need—who were less deserving of help than would had been the case had the race been white, and it showed in the type of coverage of the survivors of the Hurricane.

What would remedy this situation? The reading on Hurricane Katrina offers the same advice that Professor Chavez gave...“conscious effort by journalists to compensate for potential biases by forcing themselves to report on an equal number of positive and negative story angles regardless of a subject’s race”.

But that seems a simplistic solution really and had it been all it takes, perhaps the media coverage would reflect that. An editor would simply call aside a reporter and tell them to remember to compensate for biases before sending them off on a beat.

My solution is this: In the case of Hurricane Katrina for example, black reporters should have been the majority tasked to do the stories. This is so simply because it is human nature to feel greater empathy toward victims similar to you. The story, had it been covered by black reporters would have focused on the very plight of a people without food, shelter, hope.

But the media had a fixation on reporting on ‘violent crime wave’ which, it later turned out, was false.

And when I look at the images of the trail of destruction that Katrina was, I ask myself why it was not possible, for just that moment to set aside racial prejudices and instead report of the destruction of a city and devastation of a people.

The more I think of it, the more I realize the remedy is not as simple as my good old professor suggested in class today.