During my daily trips to Instagram looking for things to keep me busy at 3:00 am, I came across this peculiar topic. Search for White American Family, Google be wildin’… and I did.

It looks like when you search for ‘White American… doctor, family, engineer… you name it, and hit images, you’ll be hit with dozens of suggestions with black people. So, it got me thinking, what’s happening?

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White American Google: The Black Way

After a few quick searches, I could confirm that this was indeed true. A few hours later and The ‘soon to be trend’ is already taking over a lot of Instagram and TikTok posts. However, many people don’t seem to understand what is happening.

Lmaooo idk who hacked the google algorithm but I am crying ???google ‘white American doctor’ & press images ?

— mykala? (@__TheProphecy) August 6, 2020

They’ve been asking some really intriguing questions like, “Is someone at Google playing with the algorithm?” “Do black lives finally matter?” Well, of course, we had to try it out with different approaches and we came up with a pretty solid conclusion as to why.

We’ve already established that when you search ‘White American Family’ you’ll get black family suggestions. So what if you took out the ‘American’?

We did this and the results significantly change. Same goes for when you take out the word ‘white’. After this, we came to the conclusion that Google might be taking matters into its own hands.

Possible Solution

Following the search results, it looks like the ‘White and American’ aspect is what’s the issue here

• White: Looking at the pictures, they all have a white background and that’s what Google picks up first.
• American: According to the image tags, it’s pretty clear that Google picks images with ‘African American’ captions.

Try it out, see if you get the same results or something better.