Outrage after Ugandan climate activist is cropped out of photo with white peers
SOCIAL media users have come out in support of Ugandan climate advocate Vanessa Nakate after she was cropped out of a photograph taken with her white peers in Davos.
Nakate accused the media of racism after The Associated Press news agency removed her from a photograph taken with fellow activists Greta Thunberg, Loukina Tille, Luisa Neubauer and Isabelle Axelsson.
The image was taken on Friday after the young campaigners gave a press conference in the Swiss resort, where they had been invited by the organisers of the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) whose agenda this year focused heavily on environmental issues.
Nakate appeared shocked to find out that she had been removed from the photograph.
“I was cropped out of this photo! Why?” Nakate asked on her Twitter account on Friday.
“You didn’t just erase a photo. You erased a continent. But I am stronger than ever,” said the 23-year-old, who posted an almost 11-minutelong video on the social media platform.
Following her post, Twitter users expressed their anger at the news agency’s move and urged it to remove the cropped photograph and share one of all the activists.
Fellow activist Thunberg called the decision to crop her peer from the photo “unacceptable”.
Following the backlash, AP removed the photo and replaced it with one showing all the activists. “We regret publishing a photo this morning that cropped out Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate, the only person of colour in the photo,” Sally Buzbee, the agency’s executive editor, said in a statement.
“We have spoken internally with our journalists and we will learn from this error in judgement,” the statement added.
The controversy even created a wider debate about how Western media covers climate activists of colour. Twitter uses, meanwhile, also pointed out that other agencies had misidentified Nakate as Zambian activist Natasha Mwansa.
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump on Tuesday assailed environmental “prophets of doom”, delivering an uncompromising message in Davos after Swedish teenage campaigner Greta Thunberg slammed government inaction on the climate crisis.
Thunberg was in the audience in the Swiss Alps to hear a typically bullish speech by Trump, delivered just before the start of his Senate impeachment trial in Washington.
The 50th meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) got under way in the ski resort with an avowed focus on climate change but with starkly different visions over global warming laid bare. “We must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse,” said Trump, growling that “they want to see us do badly”.
He claimed that “alarmists” had been wrong on previous occasions by predicting population crisis, mass starvation and the end of oil.
Trump branded those warning of out-ofcontrol global warming and other environmental disasters “the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune tellers”.
Trump told reporters later that his Davos trip was devoted to meeting “the most important people in the world and we’re bringing back tremendous business”.
“The other’s just a hoax,” he said of the “disgraceful” impeachment trial.—Al Jazeera.