Atlanta – Vanessa Nakate gets racist white media treatment from Associated Press, as her image is cropped from a photo featuring her and other climate activists at Davos, where the 2020 World Economic Forum is held. The sad and should be criminal action of removing a black person from a story because the journalist thinks of the subject as something only whites do, or should do, is all too typical, and also deliberate.
It’s a hallmark action of a racist white media, but many give the Associated Press a pass by not reporting that it’s really acting in a way that’s white supremacist, and because it has a bias against allowing ownership and control by blacks. That’s the cold, hard, blunt truth: a black-ran media company would not do that to Vanessa Nakate.
This is what happened to Vanessa Nakate according to London-based Ikran Dahir of BuzzFeed News:
LONDON — Vanessa Nakate is a 23-year-old climate activist from Uganda who this week attended the World Economic Forum in Davos.
On Friday, she took part in a news conference with Greta Thunberg and other activists ahead of a Fridays for Future protest in the Swiss town.
However, she was dismayed to find that in news coverage of the event, she had been cropped out of a photo issued by the Associated Press news agency featuring Thunberg and fellow activists Luisa Neubauer, Isabelle Axelsson, and Loukina Tille. AP later changed the photo that appeared as the thumbnail on Twitter for the story Nakate tweeted.
Nakate told BuzzFeed News via Twitter DMs she was heartbroken when she saw the photo. “I cried because it was so sad not just that it was racist, I was sad because of the people from Africa.
“It showed how we are valued. It hurt me a lot. It is the worst thing I have ever seen in my life.”
Nakate also posted an emotional 10-minute-long video discussing her experience at the summit and how it felt seeing the cropped photo.
Share if you can
What it means to be removed from a photo! https://t.co/1dmcbyneYV— Vanessa Nakate (@vanessa_vash) January 24, 2020
The response from the Associated Press to BuzzFeed was a joke to say the least: “There was no ill intent. AP routinely publishes photos as they come in and when we received additional images from the field, we updated the story. AP has published a number of images of Vanessa Nakate.”
In other words, once the Associated Press was called out on the institutionally racist act, they responded quickly, otherwise, they’d have done nothing because no one on their staff would notice – especially the person who edited her out of the photo.
This kind of act is certainly intentional, and something I’ve vlogged and blogged about for years. Most recently, Twitter admins made up a lie about me to justify suspending my Zennie62 Twitter account in an obvious attempt to silence me but not explain why – even though Trump supporters and racist white media types have tried to gaslight me, even though my conduct was excellent. Twitter admins accused me of having multiple accounts, when Twitter’s help section has a whole series of pages showing you how to set up multiple accounts!
In 2007, New York Times reporter Kit Seele somehow mistook one black YouTube vlogger for two in consecutive paragraphs of her article about the CNN / YouTube Democratic Debates – that person was me. I could go on and on.
The only sure way to stop it is to have an active and financially powerful black-run media. ZENNIE62MEDIA is doing its part to point out and stop this massive racist problem.
Stay tuned.