What’s Google’s Idea of an American White Man?

Many people have noticed that if you search Google for “American inventors” you get a flood of obscure black people. You’re in for a different kind of surprise if you ask Google images for an “American white man.” Your results may be a little different from mine, but this is the rogue’s gallery I got when I searched in an “incognito” window yesterday.

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In the first 14 images, you get no fewer than five murders (positions 6, 11, and 13). Four are “white supremacist” killers (11 and 13), and the fifth (6) is a cop killer. We also get the mug shot of a white man who brandished a gun at blacks (position 2), two pictures of “white supremacist” Richard Spencer (7 and 12), the “abhorrent” James Watson (5), a black writer named Roxane Gay (9), and a white beta-male named Kevin Miller (position 10) who explains that he no longer says, “We are a nation of immigrants” because even that phrase “makes white people the norm”! In position 14 we find another strange “white American man,” Ahmaud Arbery, whose march to sainthood was temporarily derailed by George Floyd. There is Donald Trump, from a New York Times hit piece in position 2, and your servant, in position 3.

Only the men in positions 1 and 8 are stock images of white men, and they both illustrate articles that insult white people. The first guy is from a Vox article that is outraged to find that 50 percent of Republicans actually think “increased racial diversity” is bad for the country. Position 8 is from a Slate article that tells you “rich white guys” are jerks.

And what’s Google’s idea of an “American black man”?

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Not one murderer among them. And Google has helpfully seen to it that the first three searches are of “handsome African American man.”