Katrina: "It's The Blacks"

[marmar]

from OurFuture.org:


Katrina: "It's The Blacks"
Submitted by Digby on August 21, 2007 - 9:38pm.



September 4, 2005

BATON ROUGE, La. -- They locked down the entrance doors Thursday at the Baton Rouge hotel where I'm staying alongside hundreds of New Orleans residents driven from their homes by Hurricane Katrina.

"Because of the riots," the hotel managers explained. Armed Gunmen from New Orleans were headed this way, they had heard.

"It's the blacks," whispered one white woman in the elevator. "We always worried this would happen."


When the New Orleans levees broke in those awful early days after Hurricane Katrina, the country was riveted to its TV's watching a slow moving disaster unfold before our eyes. As the flood waters rose and we started to see people walking waist deep through fetid water and scramble to their rooftops in hope of rescue a narrative began to take shape that would seriously affect the response: the city was under seige, wild gangs were terrorizing people in their homes and the police had completely abandoned their posts.

It started with looting,the most prosaic and common crime in any natural disaster, sometimes perpetrated out of opportunism and often out of necessity. It was immediately characterized in the press as criminal and dangerous. At least where some people were concerned.

Snopes.com captured this famous photographic juxtaposition of Katrina victims on Tuesday August 30th. In the first, the African American is characterized as walking through water after having "looted a grocery store" while in the other, the white victims were said to have "found" bread and water. It was the beginning of several days of ever rising hysteria, particularly on the right, about "looters," which would cause the authorities to make some terrible decisions.

Perhaps most memorable example of the right wing frenzy was a column by Peggy Noonan in which she stated quite blandly:

As for the tragic piggism that is taking place on the streets of New Orleans, it is not unbelievable but it is unforgivable, and I hope the looters are shot. A hurricane cannot rob a great city of its spirit, but a vicious citizenry can. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/its_blacks_0?tx=3

[jgraz]

1. The problem for Peggy is "the blacks" weren't stealing enough

A loaf of bread and some water? Psssht. Get back to me when you start looting the treasury of an entire country.

[AspenRose]

2. K&R

I shouldn't have read the article (even though it's a good one), because it just upsets me all over again....

[Solly Mack]

3. I'm still angry over those photos (loot/find)

and not just that either

[bunkerbuster1]

4. You weren't / aren't the only one still angry

I lurk in an especially nasty, right-wing newsgroup from time to time. One of the diehard bigots actually expressed shock over the use of the term "loot" vs. "find" so clearly demarcated by race.

Not everyone in America woke up with Katrina, but I suspect a whole lot did.

[NYVet]

5. The whole Katrina debacle...

was a cluster from local to federal level