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by Amanda Marcotte
Southern Man, by Tara Carreon
Posted by Amanda Marcotte at 10:01 PM
I have to admit that the way that racism informed the slow response to
Katrina was so obvious that it surprised me. There's nothing really to be
optimistic about in this situation, but I am clinging right now to the
thin ray of hope that the brutal reality of what has happened is waking
oblivious people up to how racism is still the cancer eating away at our
nation's soul. Well, I can hope.
Jake sent me this story about a woman who decided to protest the vile
racism that's been on display by making up a sign accusing BushCo of
genocide, which I would call overkill if it wasn't for the fact that FEMA
was not only neglectful of the people stuck in New Orleans but was also
doing completely unnecessary stuff like not letting people leave and not
letting the Red Cross in to help people. I'm not inclined to protect
BushCo from this accusation when they were actually taking actions that
made it hard for people to save themselves and when their apologists were
unable to contain their glee when calling for "looters" (read: anyone
carrying a sack while daring to be black) to be shot. This woman's story
of her experiences carrying this sign are important--she is harassed over
and over and over again by people who don't like what is amounting to a
sort of passive version of an ethnic cleansing of New Orleans being called
out for what it is--everyone who harasses her is a white man. This doesn't
surprise me--Pandagon is being trolled pretty hard by racists who don't
like being called racist right now, and they seem to be white men to the
very last one. (And I have no idea whatsoever why it's mostly men who
freak out about this.)
Steve talks about Kanye West's comment that Bush doesn't care about black
people, which is apparently causing some whining, which to me is like
whining because someone dare says the sky is blue. Steve nails it to the
wall as to why BushCo was so stupid as to think that their racist neglect
of thousands of human beings wouldn't be politically damaging--they
assumed, wrongly, that most everyday white people are as inhumanly racist
and classist as they are. That of course isn't physically possible. When
95% of the people you see suffering and dying on TV are black, many of us
are gonna get it. The President's seeming inability to comprehend that
people not like him are Americans drives the racism and classism of his
administration home even harder.
In a week or month's time, people may shove this entire fiasco out of
their minds and forget how they were forcibly reminded of the legacy of
racism that BushCo gladly perpetuates that was flushed out of hiding by
Katrina and her accompanying floods. Maybe. I hope not, of course, but the
very fact that the woman in the first story I linked to was repeatedly
harassed by men who wanted to deny something that should be obvious to
teeny schoolchildren doesn't give me a whole lot of hope that this country
is going to truly embrace justice any time soon.
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