Race card played in New Orleans disaster
This column was printed a week ago, was going to share it earlier but never got around to it. It made me so fricking mad.
Race card played in New Orleans disaster New Orleans has had a majority black population, composing about 67 percent of the population, and was solidly Democratic. This is red meat to a certain kind of politician, the kind that seeks a political payoff by playing the race card. A number of national figures used race to seek advantage in the days following Katrina, and continue to the present. Their game is political advantage, not helping the people. This is nothing new and pops up whenever the opportunity arises.
The black residents of New Orleans were, and are, no different from their white neighbors in suffering, in pain, in distress, clinging together for support, in scraping food for their children, and looking for help wherever they could find it.
It was not hard to place myself among the people in lines at the convention centers, scrambling for whatever sustenance was available, wondering when buses for evacuation were coming. They could have cared less what political party was in power. The concern was for their very lives.
Such a concern was given lip service by a number of so-called “leaders” — Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Howard Dean — and major players in the media trying to tie the disaster to race.
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Those who thrive on playing the race card for political advantage are no better than the racists. In fact, they're worse. They deliberately exploit the vulnerable when and where they are weakest. They're like the “poverty pimps” dressed in stylish suits, talking trash to anyone who'll listen, speaking gushingly about the poor, while robbing the poor to enrich themselves.