1) Any suggestions of black looting were made up and the few that did happen was purely for food

2) No help was provided because the people were 67% black

3) All the reports of armed gangs shooting at rescue workers and medics are all lies

And yet I’ve read in many places comments like “It was like Lord Of the Flies in there”. This was on the left leaning BBC new site:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4214746.stm

Perhaps all those eyewittnesses were lying?

That statement is not incorrect. The Coast Guard did indeed have resources in the form of boats which were brought in and on the ready. They were prevented from being used by FEMA. The governor of Louisiana called for communication equipment, and it didn’t come. She called for it again and again and again, and it was never delivered.

There have been numerous reports on the Web that the people of Mississippi are doing just fine, thank you, and those reports are ludicrous. Parts of Mississippi were devastated, and the “aid” disappeared the day the TV cameras left the sites.

On one of the blogs on which I write, a woman from Lakeview posted that she was angry that it was only the black people in the Lower Ninth that were getting national attention, but that her neighborhood was just as devastated and no one cared. Unforunately, she couched her comments in barely veiled terms of “those of us who work got hurt, too,” (not to mention that white people also live in the Lower Ninth). Nevertheless, her neighborhood was totally destroyed, and she is justified, in that regard, for feeling that no one has noticed.

As for “the other cities” faring better– Waveland and Bay St. Louis and Long Beach were completely destroyed, whereas New Orleans was only partially destroyed. It is possible, however, that these smaller towns in Mississippi will do better in the long run because they are not up to their necks in corruption or busy trying to punish the people with no jobs who cannot return to their homes.

You did write that you were a sociologist, so this line of reasoning isn’t at all surprising. You did, however, omit any mention of the IQ - SES linkage that is quite pertinent to the broad social issues of poverty, crime, social malady, etc.

As for the Katrina disaster there is no getting around the fact that the average IQ of the city dropped by about 1 S.D. (15 points) after the evacuations and this loss of social capital led to some of the consequences we witnessed. It’s not the poverty of those who remained behind that led to the mayhem, for we can see by looking at the disasters that befall Bangladesh, which deals with a more crushing level of poverty, but where the distribution of IQ is more normally distributed than was the case during Katrina, that more order is maintained during and after their disasters. This same dynamic also played out in the other comparisons that people trot out, such as cities in MS and other areas of LA.

It’s not necessarily the race of the victims that is pertinent, but the average intelligence of those who were left to deal with the aftermath of the hurricane. The other cities faired better not because their populations were white, but because the majority of the brightest people didn’t flee those cities, so those who remained behind to deal with the aftermath had a higher average level of intelligence than those who remained behind in NOLA.

very few people want to talk about race; it is much easier for Americans to talk about class because of the political climate I mentioned in the link above.

Rachel, while I think you’re right-on when it comes to viewing the situation through a racial-and-economic lens, I have to strongly disagree with you on the above, in particular as talking about class leads to talking about race and vice versa.

I think what (white, middle-class) people and the (mainstream) media are afraid of addressing is the overlap: Black folks are more likely to be poor. I think it’s much easier for these folks to talk about racism when it occurs on an individual level than on an institutional and economic level - this is partly because discussing class itself is such a taboo. Just as it’s easier for these folks to talk about individual, interpersonal racism because they can easily absolve themselves (”I don’t think any less of Black people!”), whereas with institutional racism, they have to note their complicity in and benefit from racism, by the same token, ANY discussion of class implicates the middle-class. The often overlap of race and economics is the most troubling because I think it’s one time where white middle-class people have to actually remember slavery - it’s easier to look at “everyday” interpersonal racism from a more ahistorical perspective.

People at the Civic Center were prevented from fleeing the area on foot across the river, into an area where access was vastly better. People who managed to cross the bridge were generally able to escape the area fairly quickly. While White people were prevented from fleeing as well, all descriptions I read of the reasoning for preventing people from fleeing across the bridge was in heavily racially coded language. The sheriff of the neighboring community felt that his primary responsibility in the crisis was to keep those people from spilling over into his community.

Your little fantasy of white liberal expectation of helpless is simply bizarre. Huge areas of the city were destroyed. There was no power or water, and the streets in much of the city were deep with toxic muck. The infrastructure of the city had collapsed. The idea that people stranded on roof tops just need a little food so the can wait it out until their local economy reestablishes itself is just bizarre. Indeed, some people were able to do that, and more power to them. Again, there was a desire to empty the city entirely, although in the end it was never enforced, as the reality on the ground overcame the idea of lawlessness, but the goal of emptying the city didn’t come from liberals, it came from the idea that the city needed to be emptied to keep it from turning into a den of lawlessness, which, again, was heavily racially encoded.

Indeed, among disaster watchers, the idea that the Red Cross and FEMA were refusing to provide support in place was one of the horrors of the situation. That refusal didn’t come out of a liberal imaging of helpless black people, it came out of a racist imagining of NO as a city racked by lawless violence, where it would be unsafe for the Red Cross to enter.

I forget the exact time line, and I’m not going to look it up to counter your completely unsupported fantasy, but I believe there were several days early on where the rescue efforts were largely halted by the fantasy of lawlessness, and the belief that it was essential to secure the city with heavily armed National Guard and soldiers before it would be safe to continue the relief efforts. This decision, which certainly cost lives, was motivated by the idea of lawlessness which, again, was heavily racially coded.

The relief effort was a disaster for numerous reasons, combining corrupt and incompetent administrations at all levels: NO, LA, and US. Some small part of the basic incompetence was probably racially motivated (Louisiana is a state that long ago decided it was better to have no infrastructure than to have an infrastructure that had to be accessible to black people too), but most of it probably wasn’t. However, some of the disaster of the relief effort was not simple incompetence, it was coherent decisions made in response to the fantasy of black violence.

Yes, it is about race. Yes, it is about class. And those issues need to be focused on. However, it is also largely about governmental incompetance, and not just in New Orleans, but also the state government as well as failure at the federal level.

I’ve seen the reports of the aid that was offered from overseas. Most all of what would have been actually useful was accepted. Some of it was declined, mainly because the management overhead to integrate it into the effort would be better spent using material resources already on hand.

“The coast guard had available resources” is so vague as to be meaningless. Do you know any specifics?

In any event, the sum total of all the aid I have ever seen presented as being rejected or not used, divided by the amount of suffering to be alleviated, equals a number close enough to zero as to make little difference.

many people have admonished me not to talk about race in this case.

I don’t understand this–are you saying that many people have admonished you not to talk about race in the case of Katrina? Are they nuts? I don’t know how you can ever begin to separate the disaster of katrina from race–to try to do so is just to be willingly, desperately BLIND.

Talk about race. Keep the focus on race when it counts. And yeah, I’m one who thinks that class is enormously important too, but here’s a case where an entire group of people were vilified for race, with a bit of class hatred and welfare bashing thrown in for spice.

As an empiricist who studies physics, I also see this for the false debate that it is. People were left because they were 1000 miles from help in an environment where first responders had failed, a hierarchy of emergency response broke down owing to political incompetence, and limited resources were faced with infinite demand.
That “1000 miles from help” reasoning might hold for 24, maybe 48 hours. This crisis went on for weeks. After two days, first, second and possibly third responders might be in motion. Even by accident.

The element I find most conversation-worthy is the expectation of helplessness - white liberals outside the disaster area took it for granted that poor blacks within the disaster area had to be rescued.
I suspect it was because white liberals - and anyone else with decent eyesight - saw corpses floating on the streets of a major American city.

Dude, see what’s right in front of you.

As an empiricist who studies physics, I also see this for the false debate that it is. People were left because they were 1000 miles from help in an environment where first responders had failed, a hierarchy of emergency response broke down owing to political incompetence, and limited resources were faced with infinite demand. None of this has anything to do with skin color or race - unless you believe the incompetence of the New Orleans civil government to be related to the race of many of its members, which I don’t.

There is a very interesting conversation about racial dynamics to be had concerning Katrina. The element I find most conversation-worthy is the expectation of helplessness - white liberals outside the disaster area took it for granted that poor blacks within the disaster area had to be rescued. Not given supplies to let them hold out for a few days until they could re-establish their economies - rescued. Not protected from civil disorder until intrinsic social networks reformed - rescued. And so on. I can’t recall a similar disaster in American history where such racist assumptions concerning the incompetence of disaster victims were so widespread.

I apologize for the thread-derailing potentiality of this post, if it is engaged - but this post is, from my point of view, already derailed from reality in its starting assumptions.

This though: “The reality is that this is a great time to talk about race; the effects of racism have never been clearer” is great! And totally applicable to the Duke rape case.

For some people I think there will never be a good time to have such a painful discussion. Even white liberals avoid it. It’s just easier for us.