Sad but True

The reliable Digby has a long post providing useful perspective and a historical context for the racial elements of the Katrina story. Well worth reading.

In my earlier post, I suggested that I didn't think the Bush administrations failings were primarily motivated by racism. But an upheaval of this magnitude in that region can't help but reveal bigotry and racist attitudes that continue to fester in our country.

Digby picks up on something that had occurred to me, as well. Remember all those stories from last week about roaming gangs, and gunshots being heard all over the city? Have we seen any real proof of that? As you'll see when you read Digby, it wouldn't be the first time reports of armed and angry blacks were made up.

The piece begins by quoting from a Chicago Times article by Howard Witt.

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."

Attitudes like that white woman's aren't limited to the South, and we'd better start dealing with it before we try resettling thousands of people from New Orleans in places all across the country. As Digby writes:

The evacuees are a diaspora all over the country. They are "infiltrating" a bunch of cities and towns in large numbers. Many whites fear blacks in large numbers, especially those from the big city, those who are desperate. Most especially, they fear those who are angry. (Why if they get it in their heads to be mad about how they were left behind to die like animals, who knows what will happen? Lock the doors!)

I don't honestly think there is any racist conspiracy at work. There doesn't need to be. All it takes is a reactivation of long held racist beliefs and attitudes --- attitudes that led the president to say that they had "secured" the convention center on Friday night --- which we all saw in that amazing FoxNews footage actually meant that the desperate survivors had been locked inside the sweltering hellhole. It was the attitude that had tourists staying at the Hyatt hotel being given special dispensation to go to the head of the lines at the Superdome. It was the attitude that made my racist companions disgusted by the "animals" at the convention center because they were living in filth fail to grasp that these people had been expecting to be rescued at any moment for more than four days.

Smashed houses and toxic sludge aren't the only things we'll need to be working on cleaning up in the next few months.