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By Charles Bird Posted in User Blogs — Comments (3) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Plenty of blame has been placed at the feet of the Bush administration for its slow and bureaucratic responses to Hurricane Katrina, and rightly so.  But what I don't see is how the response was racist, and the comments alleging such by African American leaders, elected and otherwise, is both galling and dishonest. This is not to deny that racism still exists in the American south. I saw it personally, on numerous occasions in numerous homes over twenty years ago, and an ugly thing like racial bigotry takes a long time to go away. Generations. Yes, progress has been made, but there's a long way to go.

The hurricane revealed quite a few things, one of them being that society can break down easily and quickly under the right (or wrong) circumstances. Another revelation was how quickly and reflexively race inciters got on the case and injected their vitriol into the situation. A few examples:

Diane Watson (D-California), and member of the Congressional Black Caucus:

"These are American citizens, plus they are the sons and daughters of slaves," said Rep. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles). "Calling them refugees coming from a foreign country does not apply to their status. This shows disdain for them. I'm almost calling this a hate crime."

Kanye West, rapper:

I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it says, "They're looting." You see a white family, it says, "They're looking for food." And, you know, it's been five days [waiting for federal help] because most of the people are black. And even for me to complain about it, I would be a hypocrite because I've tried to turn away from the TV because it's too hard to watch. I've even been shopping before even giving a donation, so now I'm calling my business manager right now to see what is the biggest amount I can give, and just to imagine if I was down there, and those are my people down there. So anybody out there that wants to do anything that we can help -- with the way America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible. I mean, the Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way -- and they've given them permission to go down and shoot us!

George Bush doesn't care about black people!

Louis Farrakhan, Nation of Islam:

"I heard from a very reliable source who saw a 25 foot deep crater under the levee breach. It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry," Farrakhan said.

More from Farrakhan:

"FEMA is too white to represent us and so is the Red Cross, so we're going to demand our place at the table," he said.

Charles Rangel (D-New York):

"George Bush is our Bull Connor."

[..] The storm, he said, showed that "if you're black in this country, and you're poor in this country, it's not an inconvenience - it's a death sentence." Denouncing Mr. Bush for waging "a war that we cannot win under any stretch of our imagination" instead of providing for those devastated by the hurricane, Mr. Rangel left his audience with a parting thought.

"If there's one thing that George Bush has done that we should never forget, it's that for us and for our children, he has shattered the myth of white supremacy once and for all," the congressman said.

Just to be clear on whom the person Rangel is comparing to Bush, wikipedia has a brief summary:

Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Connor (11 July 1897 - 10 March 1973) was a police official in the Southern United States during the American Civil Rights Movement and a staunch advocate of racial segregation. He was a Democrat and a delegate to the 1948 Democratic National Convention. Connor was born in Selma, Alabama. As the Public Safety Commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960s, he became infamous for using fire hoses and police attack dogs against unarmed, nonviolent protest marchers.

Reverend Al Sharpton defended Rangel's remarks and added a few himself:

"We've gone from fire hoses to levees."

Major Owens (D-New York):

"Bull Connor didn't even pretend that he cared about African-Americans," Mr. Owens said. "You have to give it to George Bush for being even more diabolical."

"With his faith-based initiatives," Mr. Owens added, "he made it appear that he cared about black Americans. Katrina has exposed that as a big lie." As a result, Mr. Rangel "is on the right track," Mr. Owens said. "This is worse than Bull Connor," he added.

Cynthia McKinney (D-Georgia):

But I have to tell my colleagues something. As I saw the African Americans, mostly African American families ripped apart, I could only think about slavery, families ripped apart, herded into what looked like concentration camps.

Reverend Jesse Jackson:

Jackson questioned why Bush has not named blacks to top positions in the federal response to the disaster, particularly when the majority of victims remaining stranded in New Orleans are black: "How can blacks be locked out of the leadership, and trapped in the suffering?"

Jackson must have forgotten that General Russell Honore, head of the military task force overseeing post-Katrina operations, has the very African heritage that Jackson was seeking.

Donna Brazile, on a September 16<sup>th</sup&gt NPR Morning Edition program titled Examining Race, Class and Katrina:

We thought the government would come in and help us. I mean, what has scared the living Jesus out of everybody is that they let us suffer. They let us [...dramatic pause...] die.

The $4.95 transcript verifies what she said. The focus of the NPR piece was on the federal government. When Donna Brazile spoke of "they", the reference was to the federal government, of which the Bush administration is responsible for its operation. The segment started with an excerpt from George W. Bush, and Brazile was followed directly afterward by a Clemson professor who directly addressed the federal response. When native daughter Donna Brazile spoke of "us", she was referring to the community of poor and black News Orleans residents of whom she was once a member. She might as well have just said "the Bush administration let black people die." It pains me to conclude this because, even for a liberal Democrat, she's said quite a few things that I agree with. Professor Abel Bartley chimed in in the very next paragraph:

There's definitely a racial component. You would not expect to see white Americans spend four days without food or water with the press covering it every day and every minute and there be no response from the federal government.

A disgusting and unprovable hypothetical by the academic, but he wasn't the only one trotting it out. Brent Bozell, recounting Aaron Brown's interview of Rep. Stephanie Tubbs:

"Do you think black America's sitting there thinking, if these were middle-class white people, there would be cruise ships in New Orleans, not the Superdome?"

Jones tried to put race aside, focusing her outrage on charging "the government has not allocated the resources." But Brown went back to his Love Boat for Whites theme: "Now, look, here's the question, OK? And then we'll end this. Do you think the reason that they're not there or the food is not there or the cruise ships aren't there or all this stuff that you believe should be there, isn't this a matter of race and/or class?"

But given that Louisiana is one of the least affluent states in the nation, and two-thirds of the residents of New Orleans are black, is it any surprise that most of the people left behind were poor and black? There's a difference between citing racial and class realities and goosing black politicians to endorse the poisonous idea of a conscious conspiracy of neglect against poor minorities.

Then there was Nancy Giles, CBS Sunday Morning commentator:

If the majority of the hardest hit victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans were white people, they would not have gone for days without food and water, forcing many to steal for mere survival. Their bodies would not have been left to float in putrid water..."

Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans:

"Definitely class, and the more I think about it, definitely race played into this," he said. "How do you treat people that just want to walk across the bridge and get out, and they're turned away, because you can't come to a certain parish? How do resources get stacked up outside the city of New Orleans and they don't make their way in? How do you not bring one piece of ice?

"If it's race, fine, let's call a spade a spade, a diamond a diamond. We can never let this happen again. Even if you hate black people and you are in a leadership position, this did not help anybody.

New Orleans has had an uninterrupted string of black mayors for 27 years, since 1978. Who better to address and help solve the problems of race in New Orleans?  Turning Nagin's rhetoric around, and given the fact that his disaster unpreparedness plan deliberately stranded 100,000 of New Orleans' poorest black inhabitants, could it not be said that Nagin betrayed his own people? To me, the answer is no because I don't think this form of rhetoric is politically or socially acceptable since it does not advances race relations, nor does it do one thing to improve the lot of African Americans. Nagin again:

"I saw too many people die, and a lot of people didn't see any of that."

Given the subsequent reports at the Superdome and convention center, Nagin couldn't have been speaking the truth. This type of false-rumor-spreading worsened the response because unnecessary and time-consuming security precautions were taken.  More on Nagin in the Los Angeles Times:

Indeed, Mayor C. Ray Nagin told a national television audience on "Oprah" three weeks ago of people "in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."

As the headline of the LA Times piece made clear, Katrina took its toll on the truth, but it also took its toll on perceptions.  Elinor Tatum, editor-in-chief of the New York Amsterdam News, "Part of the BlackPressUSA Network":

The response to Hurricane Katrina has led to charges of racism - rapper Kanye West, for one, accused President Bush of not caring about blacks. Elinor Tatum of the Amsterdam News concurred with that assessment. "It is evident that he does not care about some people as much as he does about others. If these people had not been black and poor, things would have moved much more quickly."  [videotape]

The folks cited above are elected political leaders and influential clergymen, entertainers and journalists. The troubling aspect to all this inflammation and diatribe is the way it poisoned public discourse. What also concerns me is the extent this poisoned the minds of African Americans unfairly towards Bush, Republicans and people of pallor. Polls have shown that two-thirds of American blacks don't believe Bush, or don't believe that he cares about the plight of African Americans. The question, then, is: Who do African Americans believe? Louis Farrakhan? Jesse Jackson? Charles Rangel? Ray Nagin? I don't know, but this form of racial polarization bothers the hell out of me.

This doesn't just push blacks from President Bush and Republicans and towards Democrats (which, in many cases, was the intent), it alienates and divides and polarizes. It creates and fosters enmity, and it's wrong. This is the 21st century, over forty years since the Civil Rights Act. African Americans need new and better leaders. The words of Barack Obama weren't as colorful as many others yet he was able to be harshly critical of the Bush administration without the race-carding.  Earl Ofari Hutchinson also showed some sense:

A heavy-handed rush to paint the tragedy of New Orleans as yet another terrible example of the black-white divide in America does a disservice to all the poor and needy who are suffering. Yes, a majority of them are black, but many of the victims are white, too. Such remarks stir fear, anger, and latent racism in many whites. It stirs the same fear anger, and racial antipathies among many blacks.

Still another black man said some pretty apt words, and offered a fair template for achieving progress.

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

Martin Luther King adopted a strategy that appealed across-the-board and across racial lines. Where is that today?  Again, not saying racism doesn't exist.  James Taranto offered a concise take on race and poverty:

By contrast, issues of race and poverty in America today are far more complicated, involving questions of personal responsibility, governmental ineffectiveness and corruption, and the racial attitudes of blacks as well as--indeed, we'd argue, considerably more than--those of whites.

I don't know about the "considerably more than" part, especially in the South, but the rest makes sense to me.  Yes, there are derogatory attitudes, mostly latent, toward African Americans, but that is not the only reason for entrenched poverty.  A personal story.  Back in the early 1980s, I had a summer job with a company that recruited college students to sell educational and religious books door-to-door.  My territory was South Carolina, and I underwent a boot-camp, total-immersion experience in southern culture for a three-month period.  The weather was brutally hot and humid compared to Seattle, a place where 80 degrees and 60% humidity is considered sweltering.  I worked six days a week, twelve hours a day, visiting hundreds of families every month, in rural South Carolina from Greenwood down to Royston, Georgia.  The visits were brief but more often than not, fairly deep (and sometimes intense) since we were talking about faith, their kids and their kids' educations and futures.  By walking into peoples' living rooms and sitting at kitchen tables and talking about those things, I got invaluable glimpses into peoples' lives and saw plentiful, eye-opening helpings of southern American life.  It was really the perfect job for a would-be politician.

About a third of the doors I knocked on were African American.  The black folks were nice, gracious and more than willing to let me through the front door (more so than the white folk).  Practically all were church-goin' and God-fearin'.  I met middle class moms and dads (I didn't sell in upper income areas), poor-as-dirt welfare queens (yes, they did exist) and a whole bunch in between.  The white folk were fairly hospitable as well, but there were several who said the problem with the education system was those "integrated schools".  Who knows how many thought that very thing but didn't say it.  The racism was definitely there, it wasn't far below the surface, and it's not going to go away until a lot of people (and their ideas) die off.  But taking this racism and applying it to the Bush administration crosses the line for me.  New African American leaders are needed.