Race To The Bottom

Digby offers this look back at the racially charged attitudes that emerged in New Orleans (and in the media) in the days after Hurricane Katrina. This is a sobering and important post that captures the spite and resentment brought up to the surface by Katrina, and it suggests a perspective relevant to the situation today, one year later:

I wrote a lot about a particular form of racism — fear of the black mob — in the weeks after Katrina. I’m sure there will be many academic tomes written devoted to sorting out how this unfolded and why. But there is no doubt that it happened: we watched it in real time as the law ‘n order right reflexively called for looters to be shot on sight in the opening moments of the crisis; as the president issued stern warnings that victims were not to break into businesses for food and water (even as the red cross was told not to bring in food and water because it was unsafe); as the press reported blacks as “looting” and whites as “finding,” and as ever more bizarre rumors of violence and depravity were reported as fact.

Over and over again the fearful lizard brain of the racist mind was inundated with pictures of blacks in large numbers in one place and instead of being able to interpret what they were actually seeing — mostly desperate women, children and elderly people who had been cast into a living nightmare — they were afraid. And being afraid, they delayed and dithered and then overreacted until on the final night, as thousands and thousands of people were trapped, thirsty and hungry, living in unimaginable filth having waited minute by minute for a rescue that never came, some of them took matters into their own hands and tried to walk out of that nighmare. They were stopped by men with guns on a bridge.

People will argue that this was an issue of poverty and class, and it surely was. But the assumptions that were made by officials and the press and many people around the nation were knee jerk reactions to African American crime — assumptions that have been successfully exploited by the rightwing for many moons and which never fail to rise up in a situation like this.

Some people tried to raise the consciousness of the media about this at the time. Rick Perlstein wrote an excellent op-ed piece on the subject that was turned down by all the major newspapers. They didn’t want to hear it.

The failures of Katrina cannot be attributed solely to racism, of course. There are many, many reasons for it. But when you look back from the distance of one year on, I think it’s clearer than ever that the primitive fear of unruly, criminal African Americans contributed hugely to the way that the evacuation was handled — and that some officials like Nagin and Compass contributed by spreading the rumors of violence and giving it official credibility, probably because they thought that it would spur the response rather than delay it.

Deep down, for a lot of people, it’s quite simple:

“It’s the blacks. We always worried this would happen.”

A crucial and (almost) utterly disheartening time capsule. Be sure to read the whole post.

Explore posts in the same categories: Color Commentary, Phantom News