Please do not let this be true:
It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive. Four days after the storm, thousands of blacks in New Orleans are dying like dogs. No-one has come to help them.
The only thing that’s keeping me from going out and buying an AK-47 at this point is the phraseology, “It is reported.” Nice passive phrasing, no attribution. So we don’t know how true it is.
But the fact that it’s believable really brings into stark relief how fucked up and fucking awful this Administration and government and response has been. WHY ARE PEOPLE STILL THERE?
I don’t like to be cynical – and I am really trying not to be but is race or at least economic status possibly behind the seemingly low urgency? (in response – not necessarily word).
Keep in mind – this is a state that thought that it was a good idea to elect David Duke (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Duke) to their house of representatives and nearly elected him governor.
And even before we ask why are people still there – why were they even there in the first place? We had *days* to get them out before Katrina arrived. Is the homeland security department so clueless that they couldn’t figure out how to do a proper evacuation of all people not just those who can afford to drive themselves out?
My sincere belief is that half of the non-response is about the sociopathy of the people in charge, and the other half is racism. America’s peculiar problem rears its ugly head. Again.
And mind you: I haven’t seen minute one of Katrina TV coverage. I am willing to bet folding money, however, that the images on TV of people stealing primarily focus on one race, whereas the pictures of people in a desperate situation spread the race around a little more.
In Mississippi, perhaps. I’ve only seen black faces in NOLA (other than the hospitalized evacuees.)
I think you’re reading something racial into the evacuation situation. It’s one of those moments when it looks like the dots connect, but there are too many other factors. The whole David Duke thing is abhorent, and he was elected in a racist area of the state. In New Orleans, though, the last mayor (who’d been mayor for a long time), was black, the current mayor is black, the council is black, the chief of police is black, and a large part of the city’s government is black. The evacuation problem affected many whites down at the Stadium. I know you probably didn’t see all of the local footage, because it’s far more inflammatory to air just the blacks being left behind, but the local footage showed a *huge* number of whites and other ethnicities down there, too.
The problem with the plan was bad planning for a catstrophic event; and that bad planning is years in the making. Lack of funds, having to fight so much gang and drug war, having so many people below poverty level (28%), trying to resolve all of the issues of trying to improve ~daily~ life meant shortchanging thinking about (and spending money on) a well-thought-out long-term plan for this sort of catastrophe.
Please, do not generalize about race here. If you could see the efforts of both races side by side the way I have seen it in the past, if you could see what they’re doing today to help each other, you’d understand it’s about more than that. And there were a *lot* of poor white people.
I have to be honest and say I don’t know what the footage showed, because I haven’t seen any! (I don’t know the area at all, except for the French Quarter, so other than to say, “Wow, look at that horrible thing!” watching would be useless.) I have no problem believing the people on the ground there, no matter what the race, are working together.
But I do believe a lot of the incompetence on the part of the Feds is racial. The “those who chose to stay” meme — while the pictures show the “who” behind “those.” It’s utterly appalling and insensitive. And after a while, it begins to seem deliberate.
I believe the incompetence on the part of the Feds is economical: these people aren’t powerful enough to care about, they aren’t going to be of any real use to the Feds in an election. There were a tremendous number of whites left there, too, so it can’t just be a racial comment — it was about the fact that they were poor.
Does it really matter – economics vs. race? While I’ll choose to disagree on the finer points of the motivation behind the slow response (its not as if the US has a government who is colour-blind and this is even more true, in my experience, in the US south), there is likely a motivation (or at best a lack of vote- or economics-driven motivation) involved here and that is absolutely sick. Sociopathy is definitely a good description for this behaviour.
And the city/state can’t cry poor or anything else with regards to evacuation. There are hundreds of buses, private cars, trains, etc that could have been used to get the poor out. Unfortunately it is the attitude of “not my problem” that likely prevented that from happening. Either that or there are far more empathy-challenged there than I remember.
I am beyond maddened by all of this. This is precisely the sort of government incompetence and callousness that I am so happy to have left behind.
Todd,
The only reason I think it matters whether we claim this is motivated by race or economics is that an uproar over the wrong point will mean that the real issue will get buried — again — as always here in LA — and then nothing productive will come of it. That there are more poor blacks than whites in New Orleans is likely (though I’ve heard arguments thatit’s running close to 50/50, but I’m assuming that’s political crap talking), and that there are racial issues underlying some of the problems is likely, but you can’t make the issue that it’s all racial when the majority of the government in that area is of the same race and has been for many, many years — and has actually made things worse for that race because those in power keep looking out for their own interests.
Toni – it is a difficult line to walk – how much poverty, for example, is a direct result of racism – preferential hiring, preferential treatment in schools or preferential awarding of funds to schools.
No matter what the situation is, I think we can both agree that it is a direct result of prejudice – racial or economic (does it matter – the US has a long history of both). And either way that is terribly sad and creepy.
On a more positive note: I found this: http://www.hurricanehousing.org/results.html?zip=70112&distance=350 a very inspiring thing to read. The government may be mostly bad, but the people are far from it.
Surely you’re aware that there’s a long history of false rumors of black Americans engaging in cannibalism.
Every time American society is stressed along racial lines, we get a new upwelling of narratives based in the idea that black people are uniquely more “savage” than “normal” (i.e., white) people; that with them the “veneer of civilization” is much thinner.
I think, as a matter of fact, that as time goes on we’re going to find that an enormous number of the stories of violence in flooded New Orleans were, in fact, rumor-borne nonsense. Here’s a great post summarizing, and linking to, some of the evidence so far:
The day before I had been IM’ing with a friend about the reports of crazy behavior out of NO and I’d said something along the lines of, “When the corpse down the street starts to look tasty, your perspective on what’s appropriate changes.”
Then I read this and I freaked out.
Hadn’t even thought of it from the perspective of rumors about the behavior of blacks. I thought these sort of stories always went around during crises, no matter who was involved.