Readers may judge for themselves where Arthur Lawson, chief of the City of Gretna Police Department, ultimately belongs.

I think the Ninth Circle was the place for traitors? Betrayal of an entire city should ensure a comfortable seat.

Posted September 9, 2005 2:14 PM by SeanH

Hey, look! Somebody did something right!

Posted September 9, 2005 2:17 PM by SeanH

Call me kooky, but:

"Announcing the reshuffle, Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff said Mr Brown would remain head of Fema"

--does not actually inspire confidence that intelligence and competence are bustin' out all over.

Posted September 9, 2005 2:20 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Patrick:

Call me kooky, but:

"Announcing the reshuffle, Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff said Mr Brown would remain head of Fema"

--does not actually inspire confidence that intelligence and competence are bustin' out all over.

Agreed. And I'm peeved, because I'd gotten myself all excited--the headline I'd seen at comcast.net, while I was in the middle of something else I couldn't interrupt to actually read the article, read "FEMA chief removed." So, call me crazy, I thought he'd been, you know, removed.

I should have known better.

Posted September 9, 2005 2:43 PM by punkrockhockeymom

They’re trying to make uprooting Brown so difficult and tiresome that we’ll be too bloody wiped to go digging after the rest.

Posted September 9, 2005 2:44 PM by Kip Manley

The Gretna police had no legal right to do that. Is anyone looking into the possibility of prosecuting them?

Posted September 9, 2005 2:47 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Followed your link to the "This isn't about racism post" and read the comments. Gd t s tht y'r nt jst rd nd brsv n yr wn blg. t's mr hnst tht wy.

I understand that you're angry and grieving, but you've been angry and grieving since November of last year, and if your first response to something you don't agree with is "I can't believe you actually think that. Will you listen to yourself?", you're making it harder to hold an intelligent discussion.

I like this blog, because I agree with most of your politics, but it's disappointing to see you act the way you do. Y'r prtt mch bll wh's clvr ngh t dsgs th prsnl ttcks y mk n ppl wh dsgr wth y, t lst t th pnt tht y cn dny hvng md thm, nd rgrdlss f yr pltcs, s sn s rd smthng wrttn wth tht tn, 'm lkng fr rsns t dsgr wth y.

Prhps shld jst d ths nw nd sv tm.

Posted September 9, 2005 2:52 PM by Patrick Weekes

Well, no, it's not an orgy of good management, but it's something. It's an official acknowledgement of incompetence (whether they'll acknowledge that it's an acknowledgement of incompetence is doubtful, but still).

Posted September 9, 2005 2:52 PM by SeanH

Also, they should be universally mocked for being such complete dorkwads, cowards, and idiots. What kind of wankerly fantasies have they been cherishing all their post-pubescent lives, that they thought a bunch of needy and enfeebled refugees were going to take over their city? Did they imagine that they'd be completely unable to maintain order?

Publish every one of their names. Let this cowardice be the thing for which they'll forever be remembered.

Posted September 9, 2005 2:55 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Not cowardice: evil.

Posted September 9, 2005 2:59 PM by Robert West

Robert West, it might or might not bother them to be identified as evil. Being evil has some macho ooomph to it. I expect it'll bother them to be remembered as miserable cowards who oppressed the poor, sick, needy, and helpless.

Patrick Weekes, if you already know that what you're planning to say is that offensive, consider not saying it.

Posted September 9, 2005 3:07 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Also, they should be universally mocked....

Mocked? People who do this sort of thing should be hung.

Posted September 9, 2005 3:07 PM by Avery

Mockery is within our power at this moment.

Posted September 9, 2005 3:13 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

OK, with a public confession settling any questions of urban legends and possibly overactive blogging, I am left with one question:

Where can I purchase a flogging?

Oh, actually, two questions.

What if my billing address isn't the same as my shipping address?

Maybe I'll just dig around until I find the home number of the Gretna police chief and mayor and publish them on a public website with a copy of said confession and a URL to the article containing the confession, as well as an excerpt of victims getting shots fired over their head, and a URL to that story as well.

Posted September 9, 2005 3:14 PM by Greg London

TNH: Also, they should be universally mocked....

Avery: Mocked? People who do this sort of thing should be hung.

THN: Mockery is within our power at this moment.

And - mockery can go on for a really, really long time...

Crazy(for those of the persuation that "hangin's too good fer 'em")Soph

Posted September 9, 2005 3:27 PM by crazysoph

Oh, I'd also have to say I agree with Powell on this one, it isn't about race. If you're black, rich, republican, think abortion is murder, think the Bible should be taught in chemistry class, and think welfare is for commies, then not only would Bush send the marines to save you from the flood, but he might also nominate you to the supreme court.

I think Bush honestly believes he got to where he is because he worked hard and deserved it, not because his father was rich and former president. And by extension of that worldview, anyone should be able to be president, become millionaires, or at the very least save themselves from a hurricane.

Bush thinks these people deserved what they got, because Bush thinks he got what he deserved.

Posted September 9, 2005 3:28 PM by Greg London

I'm sure you all will anyway, but everyone should make sure you read the article Patrick links to.

The police cheif knows what he did was beyond shitty because he tried to cover his ass by saying that they cared for the people who made it into Gretna before the bridge was closed down.

Only problem is they "took care" of them and got them out and to "higher and safer ground" by dumping them off at the juncture of the I-10 and Causeway Blvd. (also noted in the article) This was one of the many places where people were waiting for days for decent water, food, and transportation. The place where thousands at one point were gathered. The place that was so chaotic that rescue workers found six year old Deamonte Love caring for six other toddlers by himself.

How many of the 4,000 people the City of Gretna police "helped' were children?

People who were at this location talked about buses dropping people off, but no one picking people up to take them to water, food, and shelter. How many of these buses were from Gretna?

Posted September 9, 2005 3:29 PM by Jenny K

Greg: but, if you were "black rich, etc." would the police of the City of Gretna sent you packing or not?

This isn't just about Bush. This is about America as well.

Posted September 9, 2005 3:36 PM by Jenny K

Not for the first time, Patrick Weekes lectures me: "[I]f your first response to something you don't agree with is 'I can't believe you actually think that. Will you listen to yourself?', you're making it harder to hold an intelligent discussion."

In fact, that wasn't my first response in the conversation in question, as you can easily see. Perhaps while you're lecturing me about being "rude," we could also talk about people who are casually untruthful.

You do seem to be persistently eager to take issue with my manner. Tell me, in your life experience, how has this sort of approach worked out for you?

Posted September 9, 2005 3:36 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

(By the way, my disagreement with Will Shetterly isn't over whether racism is somehow the core of all that ails us. I agree with a lot of what Will is trying to get at. I also think that trying to shoo away the matter of "race" with appeals to "larger" issues of class is, shall we say, less than productive, specifically given the particulars of American history over the past four hundred years. We have brains; we can discuss both, and we can even discuss how race and class become entangled with one another. I'm not appalled at Will for questioning liberal orthodoxy; I'm appalled at him for his anti-Enlightenment position that we somehow make the problem worse when we try to analyze and understand this particular aspect of it. I believe that knowing things is better than not knowing things.)

Posted September 9, 2005 3:47 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

New Orleans demographics 484,674 people, 67% black, 28% white.

Gretna deomgraphics 17,423 people, 35% black, 56% white,

I will apply Hanlon's razor here and guess that this could just as easily be explained by the fact that New Orleans has half a million people in its city limits, whereas Gretna has less than twenty-thousand. And these people simply freaked by the thought of an invasion. They probably had the entire police force up on the bridge.

I think its criminal what they did, but I think it could just as easily be explained by the fact that you're talking about small town knuckleheads running the police department, having no clue what to do about letting possibly tens of thousands of poeple walk through their one-stop-light town.

a town of 17,000 and you're talking about the great possibility that some "Barney Fife" type is running the police department. An idiot with a gun, but not neccesarily a racist idiot.

Posted September 9, 2005 3:51 PM by Greg London

I just left a comment on Will's blog, the core of which is that yes, racism is a tool of the ruling class, but if we stopped talking about race, that wouldn't make racism disappear: it would create a vacuum in which only racists talked about race. This would not be an improvement.

Posted September 9, 2005 3:53 PM by Vicki

Have you guys seen the comments Colin Powell made about race and Katrina this morning?

from CNN.com:

[...] He said he did not think that race was a factor in the slow response, but that many of those unable to leave New Orleans in time were trapped by poverty which disproportionately affects blacks. [...]

"I don't think it's racism, I think it's economic," Powell said. "But poverty disproportionately affects African-Americans in this country. And it happened because they were poor."

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/09/katrina.powell.reut/index.html

Patrick, I don't think either you or Will are wrong. Racism is an issue in this country and poverty is an issue in this country. The way they link up is that in the Katrina fiasco, much of the population of New Orleans is poor and much of the poor in New Orleans is black. Those are facts.

What we need to address is not why did Bush ignore the blacks, but why did Bush ignore the poor (Will). Oh, and by the way, why is it that so many blacks are poor (Patrick)? And, finally, why did Bush ignore anyone, poor, black, Democratically-inclined or anything else being put forward as a reason for the lack of response. They're all Americans, he is charged with protecting Americans and he failed. We need to be talking about all of it.

Things like racism and poverty are thrown into sharp relief in disaster because we have now seen what the consequences of ignoring poverty in this country are. And thanks to Katrina visuals we've been given of poor blacks slogging through polluted floodwater, it's hard to ignore the fact that race is a major factor in poverty--in New Orleans as well as in the rest of the country. Both of those hard questions need to be asked and it will suck if they get ignored in the face of the current problem.

And the current problem is failure. Bush or FEMA or Homeland Security or Congress failed in providing a way, regardless of race, wealth or political party, to get people to safety in the event of a real emergency. They failed, having acknowledged a problem in the levee system, to fix that system before the disaster occurred.

We do need to be talking about race and we do need to be talking about poverty and it is our duty as liberals to make people understand that poor isn't about collecting welfare, it's about not having a car to evacuate when you're told to and not wanting to evacuate because what if you could have saved your meager possessions and weren't there to do it. And race isn't about stealing jobs from white people via affirmative action, it's being predisposed to a life of poverty because you have fewer educational opportunities, no one in your family has ever made it out of the New Orleans slums and people being afraid to let you into their city because people of your skin color are being demonized as criminals.

This disaster has exposed the seedy underbelly of American society, but it has nothing to do with shooting at relief workers or looting. The toll of ignoring poverty and ignoring the role race plays in poverty in this country is American life, or more importantly, human life. Poverty kills, and not always in the ways people might expect. And it isn't fair or reasonable that anyone in a civilized society should be so poor that it kills them. I am not big enough to make sure that no one in this country is that poor, but the government is and should be and that, as far as I am concerned, is its primary function.

The rich and even the middle of us can and do take care of themselves. I learned this afternoon that a dear (yes, white) friend of mine lost her house on the Mississippi coast and I don't mean to diminish her loss in any way, but she is holed up in a hotel in Jackson and she has lawyer friends who will help her get her insurance settlement and yeah, this is awful, but she has options and help. I don't think too many black welfare moms have insurance settlements coming. Knowing her, my friend would say the same.

The most important lesson for me in this disaster has been that no matter how you look at it, the policies of this Administration through Iraq, through neglecting the infrastructure and through looting the social safety net and emergency programs in favor of their rich buddies, brought this result of Katrina on New Orleans. And that is frankly criminal.

I'm sorry this ended up being so long.

Posted September 9, 2005 3:53 PM by Ali

Someone, I think it was Jed Hartman, said in a comment in an earlier thread that (pardon me if I'm misinterpreting you, Jed) it's possible that, while we may at some point know exactly what happened and what was said on that bridge, it's unlikely that we'll ever know exactly why events unfolded as they did, because people experience things in different ways. I agree with him more and more as I read more.

Larry Bradshaw and Lorry Beth Slonsky pretty clearly believed that the reason they weren't going to get across that bridge is that the police didn't want any poor black people coming into their neighborhood. If the police had flat-out said that, we'd have a slightly different situation. But what the police said was, according to Bradshaw and Slonsky, that there were no superdomes and that this place wasn't going to become another New Orleans.

I have no idea what the phrasing of the police officers was. I also have no familiarity with New Orleans beyond Julie Smith mysteries, so I can't say, based on reading that, whether "no superdomes, not another New Orleans" is code for "black people are stinking looters, and we're not letting them into our suburb". Commenting on the lack of superdomes sounds, at least on the surface, like somebody saying that they don't have any way to help the people who want to cross the bridge -- that there are no resources there for them. And commenting that this wasn't going to become another New Orleans sounds like what the police chief is quoted as saying -- that he was afraid that opening that bridge would lead to looting and pillaging.

Those of us following the links here feel fairly secure right now in our belief that those fears are, if not totally groundless, at the very least wildly inflated. Beyond the whole "white people find necessities, black people loot" issue, it's looking like there was a lot of misinformation crossing the airwaves for awhile.

Pretend that you're the chief of police in a suburb for New Orleans. You have, at least in what you have told the press, evacuated your suburb and locked it down. Now the big storm hit, and everything is going crazy. You're ordering your people around to try to keep order. You're probably not spending a lot of time Googling the news -- most likely, you're using a radio or, if they have power, a television to hear what the news reports are saying about the area. And those reports are saying that all the people who couldn't get out (well, at this point they're probably saying "chose not to leave", because that lie hadn't been sufficiently kicked down yet) are roving the city, looting and pillaging and committing violent acts.

We know now, as I said above, that those reports are, if not completely false, at least wildly inflated. We know now that most people didn't "choose not to leave the area" -- they couldn't leave the area, because the idiots in charge shut down the buses. We know now that the police guarding that bridge weren't stopping a gang of crazed looters from attacking anybody left in the suburb of Gretna, spreading their violence and chaos -- they were turning away a peaceful bunch of folks who were trying common-sense solutions and being slammed by bureaucracy at every turn.

I don't blame the guys on the bridge, at least not yet, not until we know more. I don't blame them any more than I blame the police officer who, upon direct orders from his captain, shoots a fleeing suspect that turns out to be the wrong person but the right color. I'm not sure whether I blame the police chief -- if he was playing golf and surfing the web, that's a different story from the harried, overworked, no-sleep-for-the-past-five-days image I'm imagining. I don't know what information this guy had. I don't know what reports he'd been hearing from sources we now know to be completely full of it. I don't know if the people trying to get across that bridge were singing "We Shall Overcome" and holding hands or moving forward with an angry look that suggested that they were more than ready to turn from a crowd into a mob.

Whatever decisions were made, however sick and wrong they were, we shouldn't hit them with hindsight. The guys on the bridge and the chief of police are already going to be infamous -- at least, if there's any justice, they will. They're going to spend the rest of their lives trying to explain what they did to anyone who will listen, always hoping that the worm never turns and they never have to ask for help from someone who recognizes their faces. If there's a formal inquiry, conducted by a nonpartisan commission, into what information the police chief was acting on and how much of that decision was based on genuine fear due to incorrect information, as opposed to plain old racism and fear of letting the wrong kind of people into their neighborhood, I'll be satisfied. I'd like to believe that he was just acting on incorrect information, though I'd be surprised if it wasn't an ugly, murky combination of that information and built-in racism. If and when we learn that this police chief knew more than what Fox News was telling him and still kept these horrific orders in place, I will be first in line with the rope.

But for now, I believe that the people who need to be strung up are the ones who yelled "Fire!" in a crowded theater. The ones who shouted that the city had to be contained because the nonexistent crimes were happening. The ones who declared that anyone who didn't leave New Orleans was either too stupid to know what was good for them or too eager to get to looting and pillaging. The ones who tried to use spin to turn a bunch of sick, starving, dehydrated people into an enemy insurgency, because they quickly realized that they'd screwed the job up badly enough that the only possible way to recover was to make the victims look like people who deserved it.

I don't want this to be read as an attack on Bradshaw and Slonsky. Reading their story left me physically sick at the thought of what had happened and depressed at the thought that I'd remember what they wrote if anything ever happened in my neck of the woods -- that as inspiring as the story was from a perspective of what ordinary people can do when they band together, it hit every fear about the cold and uncaring government I'd ever had and told me that fear was reasonable, appropriate, and quite possibly not sufficient.

But I don't want to see the tools get blamed for what the hand. We may not know exactly what was going through the minds of those officers on that bridge, and we might never know. But we can probably find out why they were there in the first place, and who told who to give the order, and whose spin they chose to believe to justify themselves.

Posted September 9, 2005 4:07 PM by Patrick Weekes

For example:

from Bradshaw/Slonsky "Our Experience" Mon, Sep. 5th, 2005, 05:39 pm

(attempting to leave New Orleans on foot in the wake of hurricane Katrina.)

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.

Our small group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass.

From Washington Times/UPI
"We shut down the bridge," Arthur Lawson, chief of the City of Gretna Police Department, confirmed to United Press International

The Gretna Police website is available here.

Posted September 9, 2005 4:08 PM by Greg London

Followed your link to the "This isn't about racism post" and read the comments.

Patrick Weekes: If we are not outraged now, when should we be? If we are not grieving now, then when? I too followed that link and read all the comments, and I saw a discussion -- filled with passion, yes, and bitterness, but that too is appropriate. People are dying. We should be angry.

Posted September 9, 2005 4:11 PM by Fiendish Writer

"If we are not outraged now, when should we be?"

Oooh! Oooh! I know!

After Bush's investigation delivers its findings. November, 2006 maybe.

At least, after FOX broadcasts its new reality show, "Escape from the Big Easy!", and COPS! very special "Black Tide: Defending Greta" episode.

Posted September 9, 2005 4:27 PM by Stefan Jones

OK, I want to say something about race and class in the US that is maybe so obvious that people never say it, or something, which is that those poor black people in New Orleans are overwhelmingly the descendants of people kidnapped and enslaved and shafted ever since.

That race and class are tied the way they are in the US is one of the failures of Reconstruction.

The civil rights movement did a lot, but ever since there's been a whole lot of spin and telling people what to dream and damn few paths out of poverty that lead anywhere.

Posted September 9, 2005 4:28 PM by Jo Walton

Teresa - you may be right that calling the people involved 'evil' might not faze them, and that calling them cowards is more likely to hurt them; calling them cowards may be more effective as a political tactic.

But that doesn't make turning refugees back at gunpoint any less evil.

Posted September 9, 2005 4:29 PM by robert west

call them evil.
call them cowards.
call them anything you like.
Just call them.

operators standing by.

Posted September 9, 2005 4:32 PM by Greg London

I think the entire city of Greta, LA should be forfeit. Either grant the entire city to those who were trapped by the horrific actions of the duly sworn officers of the city, or simply burn it to the ground. Actually, justice demands a levee be breached, and thaty Greta, LA, be allowed to soak in it's foulness as long as the people of New Orleans were forced to, but then we'd have to build levees around Greta, LA first.

Instead, I'm pretty sure there will be promotions involved.

Most importantly, though: Does the city of Greta, LA, own a helicopter? If not, who flew that mission of destroying the refugee's homebuilt shelters on the Crescent City Connector? That person, and the person who ordered him, deserve the same fate.

Posted September 9, 2005 4:46 PM by Erik V. Olson

Unless you've got evidence that the Gretna sherriff let in poor white folks or even let in rich white folks but not rich black folks, there is no basis for a claim that this is about race.

Posted September 9, 2005 5:12 PM by Menolly

But I don't want to see the tools get blamed for what the hand. We may not know exactly what was going through the minds of those officers on that bridge, and we might never know. But we can probably find out why they were there in the first place, and who told who to give the order, and whose spin they chose to believe to justify themselves.

Oh please, they're not "tools" they're human beings, just like those they've sworn to serve and protect as police officers. Treating them as though they're are incapable of moral reasoning (which branding them as mere "tools" does quite effectively) is the Eichmann defense. "Just following orders" is not an excuse for inhumanity on this level.

Posted September 9, 2005 5:14 PM by shinypenny

Oh please, they're not "tools" they're human beings, just like those they've sworn to serve and protect as police officers. Treating them as though they're are incapable of moral reasoning (which branding them as mere "tools" does quite effectively) is the Eichmann defense. "Just following orders" is not an excuse for inhumanity on this level.

The problem I have with that argument is that we're assuming that they knew everything we know now.

I'm a cop, and I've been on duty in a massively stressful situation, and my commander says to me, "We've got a lot of looters out there, and there are some pretty horrific crimes being committed. There are relief efforts going on for the folks in the city -- the only people who you see running around in large groups are mobs looking at this as a chance to cause trouble." He then tells me that the news reports say that there are rapes and murders happening all over the place, and that people are trying to steal food from supply trucks to take it for themselves rather than letting it be split amongst the people at shelters. Hell, even at the shelters, people are coming in and abusing the people's trust with horrific crimes.

My commander puts me on that bridge and tells me that anybody I see is a looter, a violent criminal off his leash, and that it is absolutely vital to the safety of the people of Gretna that I hold that bridge. I'm told that all the relief effort those people need is getting into the city, and people are being evacuated just fine, and so nobody but nobody could have a good reason for going over this bridge on foot. The commander might well make a reference to my wife and kids, just to hammer home the fact that I've got to keep my town safe.

If I've been up without sleep and without the chance to watch anything but the news reports scrolling across the screen when I stop by the station to grab a bite of food between patrols, this might sound totally plausible to me.

The Nazi guards knew that people were being gassed, and they knew who the people who were being gassed were. They did it for a long period of time, and they got to see everything. These aren't Nazi guards. These are police officers acting on little sleep and even less information, doing what they were ordered to do.

At least, that's all we know right now. If we find out that they received overtly racist orders, and if we find out that they knew more about what was going on in New Orleans and just thought, "Hell, not our problem," that's a different story. I don't know that we've learned enough yet to know which scenario we're dealing with. If they looked the other way and let racism or classism keep those poor folks on the other side of that bridge, well, they ought to be branded. Not killed, not imprisoned, just branded with a very public sign that anyone will recognize, so that for the rest of their miserable lives, everyone they meet knows what kind of person they are.

(And maybe imprisoned, too. If they did do this, chances are that they're not people who are going to really be affected by shame.)

And to be clear, I'm just talking about the bridge. Stopping what you've been told is a violent mob trying to get across a bridge is a ton more defensible (if that is indeed what you were told) than sending a helicopter to destroy a community-made shelter and then confiscating their food supplies.

Posted September 9, 2005 5:48 PM by Patrick Weekes

Where can I purchase a flogging?

Mumbles: flogger, actually it's flogger.

And flogging's too good for them. Latrine-cleaning service at a shelter, that would be a lot better.

Posted September 9, 2005 6:05 PM by Anna Feruglio Dal Dan

"If I've been up without sleep and without the chance to watch anything but the news reports scrolling across the screen when I stop by the station to grab a bite of food between patrols, this might sound totally plausible to me."
especially when I see the kids and old people coming up that bridge. nothing says crazy rioters who will rape-kill my family with their looting powers to the blackth degree more than kids and old people.

Posted September 9, 2005 6:10 PM by bryan

I'm torn between a sad amusement and head-banging frustration at the inability of even liberals to admit that race was a factor in this disaster. Look, guys: we're talking about Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama--the Deep South. The place you went when you were sold "down the river", and where people still don't want to talk about Emmett Till's murder. 40 years of the civil rights movement is not going to erase that legacy.

Yes, we don't know for sure if "the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their city" or the comments from the residents of Baton Rouge that "we don't want our city to become another New Orleans" is code for "we don't want those rampaging niggers here". Hey--poll taxes weren't officially intended to keep blacks from voting, right? It just worked out that way.

I've noticed that the most of the other black folks I know simply shrugged at Kanye West's statements, and that we're not surprised in the least that the first images were of blacks "looting". It's not comfortable to think that racism still exists, but some of us don't have the luxury of pretending that it doesn't.

Posted September 9, 2005 6:45 PM by Nancy Wallace

especially when I see the kids and old people coming up that bridge

I think the fear of being overwhelmed by poor needy people goes pretty deep.

Then again, since so many conservatives feel so afraid of the poor, maybe they shouldn't try so hard to keep them that way.

Posted September 9, 2005 7:55 PM by TomB

Hmm. Not sure where to continue this discussion. Ah, well. Since it's here, and so am I:

What Menolly asked.

Also, can anyone point to one example of white privilege in this? Because if it's racism, someone has to be treated better than someone else based on skin color. 85% of New Orleans' poor are black (if I remember correctly). Were the other 15% treated better? Were the Australian tourists?

I can point to white privilege in the 1960s. I've been looking for it now, but all I see is Bush's consistant pattern of incompetence and ignoring the poor.

Jo, Reconstruction's part of it. But this opens up a whole 'nother discussion of how you should handle a conquered people.

Posted September 9, 2005 8:06 PM by will Shetterly

On This American Life, on the radio at this moment in Chicago, Ira Glass is doing an hour of interviews with Katrina survivors. It will probably be available on streaming audio later on.

Glass's crew is talking to, among others, Lorry Beth Sklonsky and other ex-guests of the Hotel Monteleone.

Posted September 9, 2005 8:26 PM by Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey

Will--there's this account from someone who was there. There was the fact that the first people to be evacuated from the Superdome were tourists who'd been staying at the Hyatt. One of the British tourists told the BBC that "There was a lot of heat from the people in there, people shouting racial abuse about us being white...The army warned us to keep our bags close to us and to grip them tight." I guess the army didn't care whether or not anyone else got their few things stolen.

Then there was the ad on the moveon.org boards, where people were offering housing to displaced people from NO: My husband and I are willing to house 1-3 caucasian people in our home in Prairieville, LA.

Posted September 9, 2005 9:03 PM by Nancy Wallace

The Gretna police had no legal right to do that. Is anyone looking into the possibility of prosecuting them?

I doubt it but maybe. They are certainly on the edge of criminal liability. Civil liability looks easier at first glance depending on the current law and whatever facts end up on the record.

Notice the deprivation of civil rights under color of law and the shots fired apparently by uniformed officers.

Assuming arguendo such an action lies the common significance of such civil rights actions is that attorney's fees and some expenses may be granted.

A first cut might be the old reliable:
United States Code
TITLE 42 - THE PUBLIC HEALTH AND WELFARE
CHAPTER 21 - CIVIL RIGHTS Section 1985. Conspiracy to interfere with civil rights
(3) Depriving persons of rights or privileges
If two or more persons in any State or Territory conspire or go in disguise on the highway or on the premises of another, for the purpose of depriving, either directly or indirectly, any person or class of persons of the equal protection of the laws, or of equal privileges and immunities under the laws; or for the purpose of preventing or hindering the constituted authorities of any State or Territory from giving or securing to all persons within such State or Territory the equal protection of the laws; or if two or more persons conspire to prevent by force, intimidation, or threat, any citizen who is lawfully entitled to vote, .... in any case of conspiracy set forth in this section, if one or more persons engaged therein do, or cause to be done, any act in furtherance of the object of such conspiracy, whereby another is injured in his person or property, or deprived of having and exercising any right or privilege of a citizen of the United States, the party so injured or deprived may have an action for the recovery of damages occasioned by such injury or deprivation, against any one or more of the conspirators.

Section 1986. Action for neglect to prevent

Every person who, having knowledge that any of the wrongs conspired to be done, and mentioned in section 1985 of this title, are about to be committed, and having power to prevent or aid in preventing the commission of the same, neglects or refuses so to do, if such wrongful act be committed, shall be liable to the party injured, or his legal representatives, for all damages caused by such wrongful act, which such person by reasonable diligence could have prevented; and such damages may be recovered in an action on the case; and any number of persons guilty of such wrongful neglect or refusal may be joined as defendants in the action; and if the death of any party be caused by any such wrongful act and neglect, the legal representatives of the deceased shall have such action therefor, and may recover not exceeding $5,000 damages therein, for the benefit of the widow of the deceased, if there be one, and if there be no widow, then for the benefit of the next of kin of the deceased. But no action under the provisions of this section shall be sustained which is not commenced within one year after the cause of action has accrued.

Section 1988. Proceedings in vindication of civil rights

......
(b) Attorney's fees
In any action or proceeding to enforce a provision of sections 1981, 1981a, 1982, 1983, 1985, and 1986 of this title, title IX of Public Law 92-318 (20 U.S.C. 1681 et seq.), the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (42 U.S.C. 2000bb et seq.), the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (42 U.S.C. 2000cc et seq.), title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. 2000d et seq.), or section 13981 of this title, the court,in its discretion, may allow the prevailing party, other than the United States, a reasonable attorney's fee as part of the costs except that in any action brought against a judicial officer for an act or omission taken in such officer's judicial capacity such officer shall not be held liable for any costs, including attorney's fees, unless such action was clearly in excess of such officer's jurisdiction.
(c) Expert fees
In awarding an attorney's fee under subsection (b) of this section in any action or proceeding to enforce a provision of section 1981 or 1981a of this title, the court, in its discretion, may include expert fees as part of the attorney's fee.

Posted September 9, 2005 9:21 PM by Clark E Myers

Teresa writes:

Mockery is within our power at this moment.

Artists might be able to do something with this. Or this.
Or this. Or the stirring statement here.

Posted September 9, 2005 9:44 PM by Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey

Menolly: I don't care why they did it (I have my suspicions, but those are immaterial). I care what they did.

What they did was flat out immoral, and contrary to the mission statement of the Dept., as made by it's chief.

The City of Gretna Police Department's mission is to prevent crime and maintain order while affording dignity and respect to all individuals; to protect lives and property while safe guarding constitutional guarantees, committed to the delivery of police services in the most efficient, fairest, responsive and ethical manner possible to impartially enforce all laws and ordinances, while enhancing the quality of life for all citizens through new and innovative approaches to problem solving and crime prevention; with a sensitivity to the priorities and needs of the people; and to promote professionalism and pride among employees of the City of Gretna Police Department.

Chief Arthur S. Lawson, Jr.

Given: There was a declared state of emergency. The Governor had ordered the complete evacuation of the city. That road was one of the few available to such an evacuation.

It makes it (as far as I can see) not only immoral, but probably criminal to hinder such an evacuation.

What I want to do to him is worse than flogging.

Posted September 9, 2005 10:19 PM by Terry Karney

i took my 3 children back to see my father in Lexington KY in the summer of 2002, when he was dying of cancer. My parents live in a lovely subdivision of Lexington. We come from Seattle. At the end of the visit, the night before we were to leave, as we were driving away from my parent's house where we had been for most of the past 3 days, one of my kids asked me, "Mom, do any black people live in Lexington?"

My kids, living in Seattle, which has far fewer blacks percentage wise than Lexington, had seen not one black person the entire time we were there. I drove them to a couple of different areas after that, so they could see exactly how black people lived in Lexington Ky. The houses, and apartment buildings look a lot different from where my folks lived.

It's why I left KY in 1980 and never went back. Racism is everywhere in our country, but it is very, very much present in the South. Still.

Posted September 10, 2005 12:23 AM by hrc

bryan: "especially when I see the kids and old people coming up that bridge. nothing says crazy rioters who will rape-kill my family with their looting powers to the blackth degree more than kids and old people."

bryan is my hero.

I'm going to assume my friend Will Shetterly is under the influence of some kind of bad prescription drug. Maybe like the time they gave me steroids to promote healing, and I threw a stapler at our then-art director. (Worse, our Sicilian then-art-director.) Otherwise I'll have to start entertaining unhappy thoughts about what it means when someone argues that the "Confederate" states had the "right" to secede, and then gets all enthusiastic about arguing that we ought not talk about "race." Those kind of unhappy thoughts, about someone I've regarded as a friend for nearly two decades, would really, really suck. As commenter Nancy Wallace observed in the comment section of Will's own weblog: "I didn't get run out of a shop in San Francisco because I looked like I was poor."

Maybe if Will can get it into his fucking plywood head that "talking about racism" doesn't mean some kind of moronic "everything is Whitey's fault" calculus, we can have a reasonable conversation. But I'm getting the sense that the moment for understanding has passed.

Posted September 10, 2005 12:50 AM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Nancy, we're trying to draw conclusions from limited examples. What I need to conclude racism is an example of poor whites getting better treatment than poor blacks, or of rich whites getting better treatment than rich blacks. Otherwise, I can only conclude it's the old game of rich and poor.

The discussion seems to have moved back to my blog, so away I go now.

Posted September 10, 2005 12:56 AM by Will Shetterly

Will, I've heard exactly those points explicated often enough by blacks I know. They have to live with it. Nobody has to prove anything to you. If you've missed that many basic facts about life in America ... well, that's interesting. But it's not everyone else's fault, nor their responsibility..

And I've gotta ask: how did you manage to miss that? You used to live in Minneapolis, for pete's sake.

Posted September 10, 2005 1:06 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Patrick, were there white people on that bridge? What racial designation would you give to Larry Bradshaw and Lorry Beth Slonsky? Where did poor whites get better treatment than poor blacks, or where did rich blacks get worse treatment than rich whites? I keep asking for examples of racism, and I keep hearing you telling me it's clear that racism is at work in the Bush/Neocon/Republican agenda.

If you can't give me any examples, I'm content to agree to disagree on this one now.

And I was spat on, beaten, and called a nigger-lover by racists when I was a little kid. If it'll make you feel better, call me any kind of Dixie racist redneck you want.

Posted September 10, 2005 1:12 AM by Will Shetterly

Taken to email. This is ugly.

Posted September 10, 2005 1:27 AM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

I've never denied that racism still exists in this country -- ALL of this country, not just the South. I'm not convinced it's any more prevalent in the South now than it is anywhere else, but that's a conversation for another time.

I'm not denying that the actions of the Gretna police were unconscionable.

What I have not yet seen, anywhere, from anyone, is a clear example of racism in the Katrina relief efforts. One example of poor whites getting better treatment than poor blacks, or rich whites getting better treatment than rich blacks.

From what I've read, the tourists from the Hyatt were evacuated first because the Hyatt sent those buses. They took care of their customers, then went back for more.

What I'm sick of is the pervasive "It the South, therefore it's all about race" attitude I keep encountering. It's just not so.

Posted September 10, 2005 1:29 AM by Menolly

The post-Katrina disaster seems to be making it pretty damn clear that race and class in America are like dogs in heat - you can separate 'em, but not for long.

Posted September 10, 2005 1:38 AM by Dan Layman-Kennedy

"What I'm sick of is the pervasive 'It's the South, therefore it's all about race' attitude I keep encountering. It's just not so."

No. It's the United States of America, therefore it's (to a certain extent, and ineluctably) "all about race."

It's all about class, too; and economic opportunism. But you know something? Racial fear, racial anxiety, racial angst, all there. Single Drop of Blood. Driving While Black. All the things that amount to "race".

The "South" gets some unjust snobbery from (e.g.) New Englanders whose ancestors benefitted as much from the triangle trade as any cotton broker. And yet, you know something? Not so many public markets in the flesh of human beings in Providence, Rhode Island. Tough about that. Deal.

(Signed, Great-to-the-somethingth grandfather fought for the Confederacy. I've dealt with this fact; you can too.)

Posted September 10, 2005 1:44 AM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Teresa,

There's a curious sort of anti-racism that says if a person of the appropriate skin color says something, it must be true, unless that person votes for the wrong party. At least, I'm guilty of it. Give me Malcolm X over Condi Rice anyday. But give me the Malcolm X who was also El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, the Malcolm who said, "It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of Black against white, or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter". Give me Bobby Seale, who said, "We do not fight racism with racism. We fight racism with solidarity. We do not fight exploitative capitalism with black capitalism. We fight capitalism with basic socialism. We fight imperialism with proletarian internationalism." Give me the Martin Luther King who said, "...our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation. This means we must develop a world perspective."

Please note that I have never said racism does not exist. I have only said that in the handling of Katrina, Bush's administration's offenses are against all poor people. I don't like leaving anyone out.

The rich use racism to divide the races. When whites conclude that the problem with their society is blacks instead of rich people, the rich have succeeded. The same is true when blacks conclude the problem is whites, or Asians, or Jews. It doesn't matter what color you are. If you buy into racism, if you privilege racial division in anyway, you're looking in the wrong direction, while the folks who're looking at the green keep getting ahead.

Okay, now I'm going away.

Posted September 10, 2005 2:00 AM by Will Shetterly

Cross-posted. It's Making Light. Of course I cross-posted. Going to read my email now.

Posted September 10, 2005 2:01 AM by Will Shetterly

Actually, my great-great-grandfather fought for the Union -- in the 1st Alabama Cavalry. Helped with the Underground Railroad, too. Well, one of the great-greats, did, at any rate; I don't actually know anything about the other 7.

It's always been complex.

Posted September 10, 2005 2:02 AM by Menolly

Menolly said: What I'm sick of is the pervasive "It the South, therefore it's all about race" attitude I keep encountering. It's just not so.

As someone who was born and raised in Chicago and lived in the Boston area for 13 years, trust me: I don't think racism is endemic to the South. The main difference, again, is demographic: in the South, rural and urban, there are a lot of black people. In the North and West, most of the black people are in the cities. Race isn't a constant issue in places where 99% of the population looks the same.

In this case, too, we're talking about New Orleans--which not only gave us Mardi Gras, but also the quadroon balls. Race and racial issues thread through the fabric of the city itself. That's why the refusal to concede that race had any role in how this tragedy developed is so utterly mind-boggling to me. It's akin to a natural disaster happening in Belfast and people insisting that the fact that most people who were affected happened to be Catholic has nothing whatsoever to do with religion.

Posted September 10, 2005 2:07 AM by Nancy Wallace

When whites conclude that the problem with their society is blacks instead of rich people, the rich have succeeded.

*bangs head against wall*

Will, you keep talking like this hasn't happened already. For years, the Democratic party was the party of racists. The reason that's flip-flopped completely is because the Republican strategists were successful in convincing poor and middle-class whites that even though the GOP has traditionally been the big money party, they could look to the GOP to take their side against the Democrats who were forcing the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act down their throats.

What you seem to be suggesting is to pretend like that hasn't happened, and it'll go away and the people who voted for Bush the First because they figured he could protect them from Willie Horton will suddenly see the light and realize they've been conned. I find that unlikely in the extreme.

Racism is the elephant in the American living room. Ignoring it hasn't made it go away so far--why do you think it'll work now?

Posted September 10, 2005 2:18 AM by Nancy Wallace

Sorry if this post is too long, but in all of this, I chose for some reason to state my reactions here:

As to "failure": here in Pensacola, FL, the National Guard, Red Cross and other relief organizations were here IMMEDIATELY after Hurricane Ivan, despite plenty of accessibility problems - the Guard patrolled the town, prevented looting, and so on - the areas near the barrier islands were like armed camps of all sorts of emergency workers and vehicles, within one day -

As to speculation re: power struggles between federal and state government contributing to the delays - really, Ya THINK?? gee, do they really play POLITICS with this sort of event???? Or is it our imagination that federal response to four hurricanes won Florida and thus re-elected the President? It seems that the President and his BROTHER didn't have these problems...

As to "rebuilding": now everyone who thought New Orleans was so "cute" as a tourist destination, who knew NOTHING of its central significance in American cultural history, who knew NOTHING of the unique world of the Gulf Coast, with New Orleans at its heart, will weigh in on the "folly" of the city ever having been built and expanded there, as if the forces of 300 years of history were somehow subject to their appraisal - shut UP! For those who have the heart and mind to understand any of this, and support the beauty that was and will be the city of New Orleans, all gratitude is due. Please don't forget the rest of the Gulf Coast - news reports stating "the town of Gulfport was basically demolished" are still a little hard for me to absorb.

As to "race": come ON, everybody knows, it's a fact of life in this country; let's move on...

We who care (as is so evident in the heartfelt discussions here) are faced with an historically unique task, truly a brave new world, and THAT is what we should be discussing, with one exception: we DO need to take care of that motherfucker in Gretna! :)

Posted September 10, 2005 2:32 AM by Martin

Nancy, Patrick, Teresa, I've got to bow out of this now. We have areas of agreement: Bush blew it badly, poor people got screwed, racism is wrong. That's enough for me to respect you, and I hope it's enough for you to respect me.

Posted September 10, 2005 3:41 AM by Will Shetterly

"Please note that I have never said racism does not exist. I have only said that in the handling of Katrina, Bush's administration's offenses are against all poor people."

I note that if this were all Will had said on the subject, nobody would be arguing with him. (Or, at worst, we would be having a different and much milder argument.)

Posted September 10, 2005 8:46 AM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

"Actually, my great-great-grandfather fought for the Union--in the 1st Alabama Cavalry."

Indeed, there were Union army units from every Confederate state except South Carolina. There was a whole cluster of upland counties in Mississippi where pro-Federal sentiment was so strong that the area was known as the "Little Union." A large chunk of Tennessee would probably have broken off and stayed with the Union the way West Virginia did if it hadn't been geographically surrounded by pro-Confederate areas. And so forth.

Millions of southern white Americans had no particular stake in the plantation system. And many of them took a dim view of waking up one morning and discovering that they'd been hijacked out of the Union. The Civil War wasn't just "north versus south". This is well established.

Posted September 10, 2005 8:54 AM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

There was a wonderful photograph in the Montreal Gazette last Thursday, 1st September. I can't find it online. It showed two guys paddling a raft down a flooded street, together. One is white, bearded, shaggy, the other is black, wiry, older. They're clearly both people who Mrs Bush could describe as "underprivileged". They are both looking forward, towards the camera, the future. They don't exactly look hopeful, but they're clearly intending to keep going, past the drowning stoplight. My instant thought on seeing it was "Hucklebury Finn, 2005".

Posted September 10, 2005 9:29 AM by Jo Walton

Patrick: Agreed. Suggesting people not talk about race is different than saying that the Bush administrations' offenses were only against the poor and not against blacks.

I'd only mildly disagree with the later, as oppsed to my utter disgust at the former. Suggesting that race not be talked about is a vile suggestion.

Posted September 10, 2005 9:32 AM by Josh Jasper

Quoth Nancy Wallace: Race isn't a constant issue in places where 99% of the population looks the same.

That's true, and issues of race take on a different tone in places like that.

Where I grew up, in quasi-urban Appalachia, I went to school with kids who would very seriously talk about how the distinction they drew between "black people" and "n____ers." These were not moonshine-swilling, cousin-fucking hillbillies; these were kids in the gifted program from nice comfortable middle-class families. (Whether or not they dropped into sotto voce to say "n____r" often depended on who they were talking to.) I'm sure they felt they were being very progressive in finding reasons to not be prejudiced against dark-skinned people who met certain criteria. And, yeah, this was a place where you could go a week and count the people of color you saw on the thumbs of one hand.

Those kids are in their thirties now. I wonder how many of them took the opportunity to examine their views, even after a whole bunch of middle-class black families moved in from DC to work at the Office of the Public Debt. I wonder how many of those kids are now managers or government workers, in charge of making decisions that affect the lives of many people.

I met my wife in the same town. At the time, I was living at home, making minimum wage at part-time jobs - not exactly a beacon of upward mobility. Her (comfortably middle-class, suburban) parents were never anything but kind and generous and welcoming to me. But I have to live with the horrible feeling of being glad I'm white, because if I wasn't, she'd be disinherited now.

I don't know if Dubya is personally a racist. I would not be surprised at all to learn that he - and many of the people running the show at the moment - felt that there were black people and then there were n____rs, and saw no contradiction in appointing the former to high offices while being perfectly happy kicking the latter to the national curb. And I find it very difficult to believe that it wouldn't make any difference whether a wealthy young man Jenna brought home was white or not.

Posted September 10, 2005 11:08 AM by Dan Layman-Kennedy

So many semi-coherent thoughts.

The rich folks I've seen being allowed to have their hired thugs run around with guns (while the law abiding citizens have been forced to turn their in... that bothers me) are all white.

The poor folks I see are almost all black.

The front pages of USA Today had a picture of a guy being asked (but not told) to leave his house. Other papers had pictures of blacks being forced to leave.

Is some of this class? Yes. I am sure there are (or were) well to do blacks in New Orleans. I don't, for some reason, see them in town right now, but I do see rich white folks being allowed to fly their helicopters in. Is is planned? No.

But as Steve Gilliard pointed out, one need not intend a racist policy to be so, for it to be so, if the effect is disproportionately on one race over another.

TK

Posted September 10, 2005 1:20 PM by Terry Karney

I woke up with a realization that may be helpful in understanding our different perspectives on this issue. I agree that there have been individual examples of racism in the Bush-Katrina aftermath, and I'm sorry that I haven't had the words to express that. What I've been trying to say is that I have not seen examples of institutionalized racism: Hyatt sent buses for all of its staff and clients, regardless of color. The sheriff turned back all of the folks on the bridge, regardless of color. The victims weren't just the 85% of the New Orleans poor population that is black. The administration also shafted the 15% of the New Orleans poor population that is not, and a lot of other folks besides.

I'm posting this message at “There would be no Superdomes in their city” and Please stop talking about race and Katrina. Out of consideration to Patrick and Teresa, I won't be discussing this further on Making Light. (Also, I'm terrible at multitasking, so it'll be a whole lot easier for me to discuss this in one place.)

Of possible relevance in this discussion: race and class in the USA and Humans are humans, or the three stages of activism in art and life.

Posted September 10, 2005 1:27 PM by Will Shetterly

There is an undeniable undercurrent of racism in much rich-smash-poor class warfare, but that didn't help my only missing friend--poor and white, with bad feet to boot--from New Orleans.

That's not a conclusion, not even a data point, just an observation.

As always, Randy Newman has words of wisdom for us:

Back On My Feet Again

Doctor, let me tell you something about myself
I'm a college man and I'm very wealthy
I've got no time to trifle with trash like you
Cause I must be 'bout my business

My brother's a machinist in a textile mill
And he makes more money than you ever will
He just got married to a Polish girl
With a space between her teeth

My sister's a dancer up in Baltimore
At a small cafe on Main
But she ran off with a Negro from the Eastern Shore
Doctor, she didn't even know his name...

Posted September 10, 2005 3:48 PM by adamsj

As far as I am concerned, what the Gretna sheriffs saw coming toward them was a horde of black people. Remember, these folks had been living in unimaginable conditions for several days. The fact there were a couple of whites in the crowd, meant they were just like the blacks and deserved to be treated the same.

The following is an account (which I posted elsewhere on Making light but it fits in here as well) by an atty from the NE who was trying to take his son to Tulane for his freshman year. He was evicted from his hotel on Tuesday after a couple days of being unable to get out before or after Katrina hit. He took up w/ a group of people in the entrance to the mall next to the convention center. It's a long account, so I'm posting the address and then snipping a few paragraphs for the purposes of this thread:
attorney's account

"This is pretty much what happened to us as far as I can remember it. Some of it is probably off because we lost track of time and days and nights blended. I'm still feeling very angry and sad. Watching the news outrages me. I see "Dr. Phil' opining on why people didn't evacuate New Orleans. He says they didn't believe there would be a hurricane or they didn't want to leave, etc. Well, there was no way to leave. We had no way out. People with families and no resources had no way out. There were no buses coming for people or shelters to take people to. Just announcements to leave. So, naturally, the poorest, sickest, etc. were left behind. No one as far as I could see wanted to be there or elected to be there. No one really allowed them to get out!

Snip portion

So we all went up and put down our bags. Ernesto and I walked to the mall entrance but the doors were locked. We thought maybe moving into the mall might be better and safer. At the very corner of the front windows to the entrance to the mall, we found a window shattered on the bottom by the storm. I broke the rest of the window out so we could walk in. The mall was full of shops and food and drink kiosks. We showed it to the other people with us. Since it was hot inside the mall and the people were still afraid of getting in trouble for "trespassing," they elected to camp outside. We decided to stay all together as a group. Since we had no food or water and no way to get any, we went into the mall and began "looting," gathering food and water for our survival. At this point there was no communication with anyone. No one knew what was happening. There were no police. There was nothing other than news of terrible floods. Everyone was on their own. So now with some food and water we sat down to wait. The entrance to the Riverwalk had part of the roof still intact, so we were able to wait in the shade

SNIP

Some other tourists appeared and joined us. We took chairs and tables out of the mall. The police had "opened up" Footlocker and other stores, so there were shoes and clothes available for the taking. I wondered through looking for bedding and ways to set up camp. I took the covers off some kiosks to use as a bed. Bruni found some semi-cushioned furniture, and we took cushions. One day we found pillows in a store. Our group grew as new people came looking for ways to get out of the expected flooding. At some point, I started to walk back to our hotel to find out if we could stay there. On the way, I ran into an employee of the hotel and her family who had also been kicked out of the hotel. They came up and joined us as well.
snip

The first night we were about thirty up on the bridge. The next day some others arrived. I think the second day, Wednesday, might be when the Convention Center opened because one family decided to move down there. I think it was one of the families of the hotel employees. They had been enjoying the provisions of the mall with us. Once they moved down to the Convention Center, word spread and there was a steady stream of people coming up and sacking the mall. People came out with everything, as did we. More stores were broken into and people came out with bags and bags of goods. And it spread and spread. We went in systematically all day long taking out food and provisions.

During all of this, there are no police around. There are no authorities around. There is no food. There is no water. There is no information other than the hysteria and rumors from the radio. No one knows how long we'll be there. No one knows when the floods will reach us. The news indicates that the airport is under ten feet of water. That the main shelter, the Superdome, has lost part of its roof and is flooding. That there is killing and looting and who knows what else. Everything is rumor. No one knows anything. If you see cops, they are on their own. They are also homeless and if they talk to you it is to say you are on your own.
snip

By Wednesday, the streets are filled with people who are at the Convention Center. There are thousands of people in the streets. No one has food or water. It is hot and miserable. It was maybe Wednesday or Thursday that some people on the street are yelling about dead bodies and toss a body wrapped in a sheet on the side of the Convention Center just below us.

Snip
There is desperation all around. And anger. And violence.

Our group is about fifty. We are mostly tourists from the US, Australia, England, etc. There are also several families from New Orleans who were flooded out who have joined us. Two of the people are nurses. The bathrooms in the mall have overflowed. There has been no water since Tuesday night. Food is rotting. Everything smells, as do we. But we are organized. We have set up buckets behind broken pieces of zinc roofing as bathrooms. We have sodas and water stacked up in our kitchen. While there is still ice in the mall, we have some hams buried there. We have umbrellas and trash cans and trash bags. Even disposable gloves to help avoid disease. We also have dead bodies, dead rats, and shit and stink all around. And we have no idea how long we are here for.

Our group is mostly white and from Middle America. They decide that the Blacks (the Convention Center is 99% Black obviously) are planning to murder us to get attention and help. There is mass hysteria in the group and racism is rampant. People don't know where to flee. Rumors are everywhere about murder, rape, etc. There are shots during the night (Thursday? Friday?) At 2 am, there is a huge explosion across the river and a huge fire. Smoke pours in from fires in every direction. There is some nasty racism in our group. One day, when the hysteria is greatest, a Black man stands up and says -- why do you think these people want to kill you? They are surviving just the same as you. Struggling just the same. Just as desperate as you. They don't care anything about you. They are concentrating on surviving, etc. That calmed people a bit and made them feel particularly foolish. At the same time, more and more families from the Convention Center were moving up to the walkway with us. Our group grew to about 80. Each morning people began to bag the garbage. Others swept the walkway. Some set out breakfast for everybody. Two women who were home care workers for the elderly emptied and cleaned the shit buckets. A group would go into the mall and forage for provisions. Then we would sit all day and wait.

snip
Everybody was waiting for the promised buses to evacuate us. Every day there were rumors of buses. Every day we waited and watched. Nothing ever came. Every day there was more filth. More people fainting from dehydration. Children were getting sick. Disease was becoming a bigger worry.
snip

Our community on the walkway was interesting. One day a reporter came by and asked me if we had a "mayor." We didn't. Everyone worked. Everyone joined in. Everyone did the job that made them most comfortable. And everything functioned. And as people joined us, they automatically joined in the work. There were differences but everyone worked. When there was talk about leaving or looking for ways out, it was discussed collectively. There was always a sense of staying together and getting out as a group. There was also nastiness and racism and comments about "the people down there" in the Convention Center. We intervened with a lot with people in our group who were blaming all the "people down there" for the violence. We intervened when reporters started to come and were told that "the people down there" were looting and killing. We told them that they were doing just what we were doing -- doing what was necessary to survive in desperate circumstances.
snip

I don't know what else to say. We were anxious all the time. The nights were the worst. Partly because nights are generally more frightening. Also because there were often shots or explosions. There was always a surprise. And it was always bad news. It seemed like it would never get better. We just waited and scavenged. We worried that things would get more violent as they got more desperate. We also made incredible friends and saw amazing acts of kindness.

snip

It was Friday or Saturday that we heard the news that Bush was coming to view the disaster. That was when I first thought we would be getting out. I knew that New Orleans was another excellent political stage, a chance to improve his ratings, for Bush and that the president wasn't going to show up unless the troops were coming and the mess was going to be cleaned up. Here was a place where an appearance without an immediate success would be a political disaster. We looked down the next day at noon, and of course there were the troops. And a perimeter was set up. And piles of water and food were set up in the parking area. And that was the beginning of the evacuation. By the next day the buses arrived. I think we finally left round 4 pm on Saturday.

Once the troops arrived, the general anxiety level in our community went down. Now it was just a question of getting out. Fires were burning. When the wind shifted, it was hard to breathe, but we knew if no other disaster hit, we would get out soon. As always they told us the buses were coming. We didn't believe it for a minute. The National Guard told us we had to vacate the walkway and go down onto the street to await the buses. Of course we refused. We told them we had a community here that was self-sufficient. There was no need for us to be on the street and in the sun for nothing. That here we were supplying food, medical services, etc. to ourselves and to anyone who had a need. By this time we had about five or six elderly incapacitated people in our group. They had been left behind by a hospital when they evacuated. They were with a nurse who had been abandoned with them. We pointed out that our sick could not go down. We had another nurse in our group who was very well spoken and helped convince the National Guard that we had to stay for reasons of the health of the children and the elderly. So we stuck together and stayed on the walkway. No body left until we finally saw the buses and were assured that everyone would get out. And then we marched out together as a group with much of the group still intact.

In convincing the National Guard to let us stay, one of the more hateful and delusional of our group argued to the Guard that we should be left on the walkway because of "racial tensions." This was the same woman who had been telling everyone who would listen that the Blacks would slaughter us to gain media attention so they would be evacuated. Anyway between all the arguments we were allowed to stay. And it also resulted in one of the most shameful moments of our stay. When the meals were distributed in the parking lot, several distribution lines were formed. We were given a separate line. Our line was escorted to and from the food by Guardsmen. No one from our group was ever able to walk alone. As always, it is the racist hysterical argument that prevails. It was better not to get food than to pass through that disgrace.

snip

And it is no wonder when all the papers write and all the news reports is looting and violence -- as if there was no need or reason to "loot." Sure, there were some violent people there. There are everywhere. But this handful gets turned into "those people." And everyone gets branded. So no compassion is needed for the poor. After all, they brought it on themselves. They wouldn't let the government help even though the government tried so hard. And that becomes what this country believes. And then of course the government can "morally" do nothing for the poor -- which is what it intended in the first place
_______________

Read the whole thing. Read it twice. Then email it to your friends.

Posted September 10, 2005 3:55 PM by hrc

Didn't that negro later on wash his face and hands and reveal that in fact he was a millionaire?

The irony has layers.

Posted September 10, 2005 4:03 PM by bryan

bryan,

Yes, but I'm not sure the makeup is metaphorical.

Posted September 10, 2005 4:21 PM by adamsj

no, I don't think that it was metaphorical. I think the irony was in the statement "Girl, I ain't a negro, I'm a millionaire.."
As in that the second was the opposite of the first.

Posted September 10, 2005 5:00 PM by bryan

of course one should note the song was sung in the persona of an inmate of an insane asylum of some sort.

Posted September 10, 2005 5:01 PM by bryan

Dan, you left out one of the mantras of that mindset: "Not all n----rs are black."

Posted September 10, 2005 6:37 PM by OG

I think a problem with talking about racism in the US is that people tend to want to think of it as something particular and peculiar (echoes, of course of the "peculiar institution" which slavery was frequently called for some reason by its supporters). We want to identify some people as racists and blame them for racism, and exonerate the rest of us. Or -- we want to broaden the term to include all kinds of prejudice and bigotry, which trivializes and blunts the word all out of meaning.

But racism isn't a characteristic of some mean people, nor is it synoymous with all bigotry. It's the pervasive condition of a racist society -- which is to say a society which has at its core a definition of race -- a concept which has no meaning outside of this social history -- and a set of historical relationships based on this definition, and a set of historical events which are caused by and also cause that definition and those relationships.

It does not exonerate anybody to understand the pervasiveness of racism, the intricate and inextricable part it plays in every basic thing about the US.

What I wish was more widely understood is that racism isn't about skin color. Skin color is the tag that is used most often in the US to identify who belongs to the caste. But it isn't always. You get people quibbling about race membership -- because the stakes are high and the terms of membership mean nothing but what we say they do.

So, I mean, arguing that Gretna and other incidents aren't about racism is wishful thinking (though I have no idea what would be gained if we could manage to talk our way around to calling it something else).

I do disagree with WIll, but I am still grateful for Dogland.

Posted September 10, 2005 9:20 PM by Lucy Kemnitzer

He said, "Girl, I am a zombie, not a metaphor,
As you can plainly see
So many readers were after my meaning
But I'm proud to say you were only after me."

Posted September 10, 2005 10:09 PM by Avram

Lucy: the "peculiar institution" which slavery was frequently called for some reason by its supporters

A change in meaning; cf "awful" and "pompous", which a Poul Anderson story attributes to Charles II's praise of St. Paul's. At the time, it meant "specific to us" rather than "strange".

Posted September 11, 2005 12:43 AM by CHip

CHip: "peculiar" was already shifting, because there are contemporary writers who would say "the peculiar institution is peculiar indeed." (inexact quote and I can't cite now, but I do think I just ran into it in Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit last month)

Posted September 11, 2005 1:11 AM by Lucy Kemnitzer

The EMT's story has made it to the NYTimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/national/nationalspecial/10emt.html

Posted September 11, 2005 1:48 AM by Stefan Jones

Quoth OG: Dan, you left out one of the mantras of that mindset: "Not all n----rs are black."

Ah, yes. Thank you. That was almost always a corollary of that theorem.

I'm left with the feeling that, as dreadful as hatred always is, the mental gymnastics it inspires are truly breathtaking.

Posted September 11, 2005 2:20 AM by Dan Layman-Kennedy

I think I see Lucy's point, but I don't see how talking about racism in the way I see it done does anything besides perpetuate it. If we want the artificial construct that is race to go away, why do we keep dwelling on it, and dwelling on other people dwelling on it?

Posted September 11, 2005 4:01 AM by Menolly

Avram,

Thank you for making me laugh! Laughs have been few and far between lately.

Posted September 11, 2005 8:16 AM by adamsj

"As always, it is the racist hysterical argument that prevails."

I'd just like to tweak that a bit to this:

"As always, it is the hysterical argument that prevails."

Arguments that successfully engage a person's fear and hysteria will replace arguments that require reason and compassion.

So, given that fear has replaced compassion for some, will telling the people who are afraid that they're racists actually do any fucking good?

History says "no".

The corollary to the above would seem to be

"Arguments that successfully engage a person's reason and compassion can replace arguments based on fear and hysteria."

The key point is the word "engage". Calling someone a racist mother fucker may be 100 percent factually correct but won't help a damn bit. The black man who stood up and said "why are you so afraid? We're trying to survive the same as you" actually engages a person's compassion and reason. If the same black man had stood up and called the woman a "racist bitch", it would only reinforce her fear and do nothing to solve anything.

That some individuals in this event were/are racists I do not doubt. That it was mainly a question of racism I do doubt. That saying it was racism will actually change a single fucking thing I highly doubt.

My opinion on the matter is far more pragmatic. If you want Bush to be held responsible for his incompetency for this catastrophe, egage voter's reason and compassion.

If it had been a terrorist bomb sitting on the levee, there would have been no warning and the military response would have been 4-5 days in coming, it would be unacceptable. Bush is the commander in chief and is ultimately responsible for the military. Whether people could evacuate beforehand, whether they SHOULD have evacuated beforhand, is irrelevant to whether or not the military response was grossly inadequate for a national catastrophe, is irrelevant to whether or not FEMA's response was grossly inadequate, is irrelevant to whether or not Gretna should have blocked the bridge.

You can cry "racism" and you may very well be right. But being right doesn't mean you will win the battle. That only happens in movies. In the real world, winning this battle means convincing the country to hold Bush et al accountable, which means engaging their reason and compassion.

Charges of "racism" won't do it. So whether or not this was racist is irrelevant to wehther or not calling it racism will actually see Bush et al directly blamed for this.

(A) Bush's military response was slow because the victims were black.

(B) Bush's military response was slow. If the same catastrophe happened to YOU, his response could be just as slow.

If you make the charge (A), then it polarizes and bifurcates the issue to listeners to the point where people who aren't black and aren't particularly righteous about racism won't give a damn.

If you make the charge (B), then Bush's incompetency suddenly becomes EVERYONE's problem, because if it had been a tsunami that hit Virginia or a massive earthquake that hit california or a volcano that exp