DEBUNKING RACIST KATRINA MYTHS

From CounterPunch, an essay on all the recent racist Iowa/NOLA flood comparisons, written by my new favorite racism basher, Tim Wise:

The Ugly Side of Disaster

So consider Limbaugh's formulation, where he says, "I don't see a bunch of people running around waving guns at helicopters, I don't see a bunch of people running shooting cops. I don't see a bunch of people raping people on the street."

Fair enough. Those things aren't happening in Iowa. Yet, according to multiple post-Katrina investigations, and stories written up by the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the New Orleans Times Picayune, the London Guardian, the New York Times, Popular Mechanics, Reason Magazine and the American Journalism Review, they weren't happening in New Orleans either. Reports of shooting at helicopters, or rapes or murders were almost entirely false. There were no murders in the evacuation centers, few if any sexual assaults (and none on the street as Limbaugh claimed), no helicopters fired on, and no police officers shot by residents. Yes, there was looting, although by a distinct minority of persons trapped in the city, and overwhelmingly for necessities like food, medicine, water,and clothing to replace the rotting, soaked rags people were wearing after wading through waist-deep water. And according to persons on the ground in the flood zone, even the luxury items taken were typically used as barter chips, to get rides out of the city for oneself and one's family when it became obvious that large scale assistance wasn't going to arrive any time soon. In other words, reports of widespread thuggery in New Orleans during the flooding have been greatly exaggerated, if not entirely fabricated, and have only remained believable to millions because of the race and class biases that allow people to believe the worst about poor black folks even without a shred of actual evidence.

And while Limbaugh and others praise Midwesterners for pulling together in a spirit of cooperation--as opposed to the animalistic chaos we are to envision when thinking of New Orleanians during Katrina--the fact is there were innumerable acts of kindness in the streets of New Orleans as well. Those who personally brought supplies to the thousands trapped downtown reported little if any fighting or random anger amongst the assembled; rather, they saw persons trying to shade the elderly, and make sure that old folks and the very young had first dibs on what little relief supplies were dribbling in. But the media focused on none of that, choosing instead to highlight reports--false as it turned out--of mass violence.

Then of course have been the suggestions, especially common in the e-blasts and blog postings to the effect that Iowans, unlike New Orleanians, have helped themselves, because while the latter had grown dependent on government to solve their problems, Midwesterners in the "heart of America" still value the importance of self-reliance. But the fact is, Iowans are no less likely to receive government assistance than those in New Orleans were prior to Hurricane Katrina, according to the Census Bureau's American Community Surveys, taken in 2006 (the most recent year available) and 2004 (the last data collected for New Orleans before the flooding of that city).

Click here for more.

And this vile racist bullshit isn't just coming from hate-radio, email, and blogs: I was stunned recently while scanning through reader comments on a story about the Iowa flooding in the Houston Chronicle; the majority of them were very much along the lines of the crap-rhetoric Wise describes in his essay.

What is it about so many Americans that makes them so ready to accept such racist narratives that have absolutely no evidence to support them?

I mean, sure, some of this was launched almost immediately by the White House in order to take political advantage of the situation as quickly as possible. But Katrina was a watershed event for the Oval Office: most Americans appear to have not bought into Karl Rove's story line that New Orleans corruption, rather than Federal incompetence, was responsible for the worst events during the week-long Reign of Chaos after the storm hit. Likewise, the corporate news media broadcast unverified frightening rumor after unverified frightening rumor, as fact, for days and days. But the vast majority of these horror stories, the rapes, the shootings, the looting, were corrected within a few weeks of airing. The record is clear: the people of New Orleans did not turn on each other. They were just trying to survive. On their own.

Nonetheless, all this bullshit has a great deal of traction. Many Americans apparently need to believe that NOLA's African-American population turned to savagery and sloth in the face of disaster, in spite of mountains of evidence to the contrary. Clearly, the appeal of such mythology is due to racism, even among people who adamantly insist that they are not racist. Fuck man, even suggesting that these comparisons are racist pissed off numerous commenters for the Chronicle story linked above.

At any rate, the Wise essay is longish, but well worth reading, if only to arm yourself with a shitload of facts to counter any thick-necked asshole who might waylay you with the "good white Iowans versus bad black New Orleanians" fiction running around lately. Go check it out.

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