Getty Images Gets After White Men

I’m doing a little work on a textbook. The publisher has free access to istockphoto.com, a service I hadn’t previously heard of but provides images similar to the Shutterstock pictures you’ve probably seen included in various online articles and the like.

I was looking for an image of a shoplifter for one of the modules I was finishing up. On the first page of results, containing 59 images, I noticed not a single perpetrator was black. I went through the other four pages of results, all of which were similarly completely devoid of black perps. I literally found a thieving pig before I was able to find a black filcher!

I scanned the first page of results, around 60 per, for other criminal search terms. Some images only showed victims or no people at all. Among those that did include perpetrators, the percentage distributions are as follows.

For “shoplifting“:

White male — 42%
White female — 56%
Asian female — 2%

For “rapist“:

White male — 100%

For “assault“:

White male — 88%
White female — 12%

For “burglar“:

White male — 100%

For “robbery“:

White male — 91%
White female — 6%
Asian male — 3%

For “terrorist“:

White male — 53%
Arab/MENA male — 47%

Not a single result from any of these searches returned a black or Hispanic perp. This despite the fact that non-Asian minorities are drastically overrepresented among criminals in the US.

When I tried “black burglar“, just two of the 60 images contained black male perps–the vast majority of the rest were white men!

This service is a major content provider for academic publishing and it is thoroughly anti-white.

Whenever the thought crosses my mind that I may becoming too cynical, something like this comes along to knock some sense into me by reminding me that I’m not cynical enough.