What Happens to a Race Deferred

Jason DeParle wrote in NYT The white people got out. Most of them, anyway. If television and newspaper images can be deemed a statistical sample, it was mostly black people who were left behind. Poor black people, growing more hungry, sick and frightened by the hour as faraway officials counseled patience and warned that rescues take time.

New Orleans racial mix was 28.05% white, 67.25% black, so a lot of blacks followed the manditory evacuation orders. And the black mayor had 364 buses owned by the New Orleans public transit or the 205 buses owned by the New Orleans school system at his disposal. How many of them did he use to get the poor (black AND white) that had no way to get out without help, out of New Orleans, either before the storm, after the storm but before the levee broke, or after the levee broke?

What a shocked world saw exposed in New Orleans last week wasn't just a broken levee. It was a cleavage of race and class, at once familiar and startlingly new, laid bare in a setting where they suddenly amounted to matters of life and death. Hydrology joined sociology throughout the story line, from the settling of the flood-prone city, where well-to-do white people lived on the high ground, to its frantic abandonment.

The pictures of the suffering vied with reports of marauding, of gunshots fired at rescue vehicles and armed bands taking over the streets. The city of quaint eccentricity - of King Cakes, Mardi Gras beads and nice neighbors named Tookie - had taken a Conradian turn. In the middle of the delayed rescue, the New Orleans mayor, C.Ray Nagin, a local boy made good from a poor, black ward, burst into tears of frustration as he denounced slow moving federal officials and called for martial law.

So we have a poor black mayor crying in frustration, and blaming it on federal officials. Did he use the New Orleans police to restore order? Did he use the 364 buses owned by the New Orleans public transit or the 205 buses owned by the New Orleans school system to try to get people out of New Orleans, or did he just cry and complain?

Captain Ed blogged Unfortunately for DeParle, the problem of the people left behind squarely falls into the incompetence of local government to follow its own emergency response plan -- a local government headed up by the "local boy made good from a poor, black ward," Mayor Ray Nagin. Certainly he of all people would have known that an evacuation order might disproportionately affect the poorer citizens of his city. Yet Nagin and his office never engaged the EOC, never got the buses out of the yards, and never attempted to rescue those who wanted to leave New Orleans but lacked the means to do so. Does DeParle claim that Mayor Nagin acted out of racial animosity rather than incompetence?

Baldilocks blogged Back when I was growing up, real men took charge and made decisions. They protected women and children--especially their own children--and got them out of harm’s way; out of the way of things like hurricanes, especially when they had days of advance warning. And if they made the wrong decision, they tried to make things right and/or took the consequences. Like young Jabbar Gibson. They didn’t expect someone else to be the protector—be the man—and then whine about how the substitute man wasn’t being the substitute man fast enough. No one should wonder that gangs of thieves, terrorists, rapists and murderers plagued the refugees. Such are the rotten fruit of fatherless societies--societies with a dearth of real men.

Jerry blogged To look at the coverage, the ONLY place affected by Katrina was New Orleans. I know, I know, the media just wants to 'help' by pointing out the problems. And now they're tossing the race card on top, trying to ... what? Try to deflect blame from the NOLA mayor and the failed city disaster prep folks? Yet if the media won't acknowledge and detail the scope of the actual problem, how can they effectively suggest remedies?

It's not about taking care of the disaster victims or possibly fixing the problems- it's about dragging down Bush. They've got great pictures to do it with, and over the next few months EVERYTHING is going to be Bush's fault - even when all the evidence is pointing precisely where the real problem was