Cut Or Find By Cherole Carbado Analysis

The Results of Racial Frames

The media has been the window for people’s social and political awareness. It’s role on providing access to information is paramount and it becomes predominant especially during times of catastrophe. However, its credibility is becoming more questionable after all their biased news and exaggerated approach affected by frames, inevitably sparks different public response. In their essay, “Loot or Find: Fact or Frame?”, Cheryl Harris and Devon Carbado explain that as the author and reader of events, the media both challenged and underwrote racial frames. They explain how a race of a subjects’ frames inscribes different meanings to two relatively the same pictures from the Hurricane Katrina even without their captions,

This mixture of race is one of the main factors that define America, which unfortunately often appear as racial division. This idea of racial division was driven by social, cultural, political, and economic interest and is justified by religious belief, not by physical appearance and skin color. (Holtzman and Sharpe 609) The idea of race was developed as a frame through a counterstory by “revealing additional facts, examining the same facts from different perspectives. Personalizing the experiences of the targeted, humanizing the voices of the oppressed, and critically analyzing the misinformation that the dominant group has heretofore represented as unimpeachable”. This became the act of racism. In trying to exploit the issue of racism, there is a need of identification of the matter as a frame or a

Because of this, possible evacuation areas became no-go areas and help from Red Cross were delayed, all because of their concern about black criminality and their focus on the violence directed against the rescuers. This frame of law and order and black criminality influenced both the media’s overreporting of violent actions of the poor black people and underreporting the government’s failures.

Harris and Carbado’s ideas define the Vincent Parillo’s three levels of prejudice: cognitive, emotional, and action-oriented prejudice – where Harris and Carbado starts by showing the photographer’s thoughts about the two images during the Hurricane Katrina – tells how the viewers feel about these captions, and lists the actions that the media and the government have done towards this event.

Besides the essay’s reflection of Parillo’s three levels of prejudice, the authors effectively delivered their essay by raising awareness to disregard racial frames and focusing on the more important issues in order to see underlying problems about the Hurricane Katrina. The authors also successfully reminded their readers the lessons from this disaster to build coordination with the nation’s empathy and compassion and deepen their understanding on race and its effects on the existing