Exploiting The Race Card/Is It Racism In New Orleans?

[NATO AIR]

two excellent posts from some of the better bloggers (Democracy Project/Captain's Quarters)

http://www.democracy-project.com/archives/001823.html

Saturday’s editorial in the Washington Post is saner than the hysteric extremism of Friday’s editorial in the New York Times. The Washington Post is not off base (pun intended, if one masochistically reads the New York Times’ editorial). The Washington Post goes in the correct direction, although not far enough. It faults inadequate attention to those least likely to evacuate, and recommends much more future focus on this problem. But, the Washington Post stops before critiquing the sheer incompetence of New Orleans’ Mayor and Louisiana’s Governor.

The New York Times editors believe the suffering in New Orleans is due to U.S. National Guard units being in Iraq. In last Friday’s post, I dealt with that left-extremist infection of the New York Times’ editorial board.

By contrast, the Washington Post’s editors conclude, “But if blame is to be laid and lessons are to be drawn, one point stands out as irrefutable: Emergency planners must focus much more on the fate of that part of the population that – for reasons of poverty, infirmity, distrust of officialdom, lack of transportation or lack of information – cannot be counted on to leave their homes after an evacuation order.”

Some on the left or among Blacks charge that the lack of attention and speed in helping the mostly Black victims we’ve seen on TV is due to racism. I won’t link to them, as I refuse to give their racism further currency. I, also, disagree with some on the right who charge that the fault resides mostly in a welfare or entitlement mentality of those in the Black community or its Black and liberal leadership not making New Orleans a richer city. Again, I won’t link to them, as I refuse to give their ideologically extreme filter further currency.

Both camps miss the simpler explanation. The fault, more simply, lays in both the limitations of any government to foresee and adequately prepare for all contingencies, compounded by the stubborn failure of the city and state leadership to more energetically prepare and their resistance to enthusiastically cooperate with federal authorities. Race and political affiliation has far less to do with either than sheer inadequacy and self-defensive CYA. It was not a Rudy Guiliani moment.
Continue Article @ Link

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/005374.php

September 04, 2005
Katrina: More Race, No Class

Jason DeParle gives his assessment of the true story of the destruction of the Gulf coast -- the race card. His editorial in the New York Times doesn't wait for any scholarly analysis or dispassionate research for his conclusions to meet the Paper of Record's standards for publication, either:

THE white people got out. Most of them, anyway. If television and newspaper images can be deemed a statistical sample, it was mostly black people who were left behind. Poor black people, growing more hungry, sick and frightened by the hour as faraway officials counseled patience and warned that rescues take time.
What a shocked world saw exposed in New Orleans last week wasn't just a broken levee. It was a cleavage of race and class, at once familiar and startlingly new, laid bare in a setting where they suddenly amounted to matters of life and death. Hydrology joined sociology throughout the story line, from the settling of the flood-prone city, where well-to-do white people lived on the high ground, to its frantic abandonment.

The pictures of the suffering vied with reports of marauding, of gunshots fired at rescue vehicles and armed bands taking over the streets. The city of quaint eccentricity - of King Cakes, Mardi Gras beads and nice neighbors named Tookie - had taken a Conradian turn.

In the middle of the delayed rescue, the New Orleans mayor, C.Ray Nagin, a local boy made good from a poor, black ward, burst into tears of frustration as he denounced slow moving federal officials and called for martial law.

If the opening paragraph of this screed didn't cause the editors at the New York Times to spike this column, they have apparently given up any pretense of editorial standards at the Gray Lady. "If television and newspaper images can be deemed a statistical sample"? Since when does that ever apply? Perhaps the Times can abandon its polling contracts in the next election and simply scan for TV coverage of political events to determine racial demographics in politics, too. What utter rubbish, and unfortunately for the Times and its readers, this intellectually famished assumption forms the basis of the entire editorial.

We don't know the racial composition of the people left behind. We don't know the racial composition of the people who evacuated. We do know that African-Americans comprised over two-thirds of New Orleans, and we can expect them to have high representation in both groups. Almost two-thirds of the population drive themselves to work alone, so clearly the opportunity to evacuate didn't just remain with the "white people".

That research took me less time than it would have to turn on CNN and watch for thirty seconds and count up the white people I saw.

DeParle's "analysis" fails to take into account any of this data, but also ignores the notion that the media might have its own agenda in the images and stories selected for publication and broadcast. He doesn't even consider the idea that, like himself, the media has taken advantage of the widespread devastation to punch up its reporting on the racial divide in America.
CONTINUE ARTICLE @ LINK

 

[Adam's Apple]

Let's just hope everyone--governments and citizens alike--learn from this tragedy and will be better prepared when disaster strikes in the future. Pre-planning and on-your-feet, emergency thinking certainly were missing in New Orleans. If you have five days warning, that should have made a difference. The fact that Louisiana had been hit by hurricanes in the past--some quite serious--should have made a difference in preparations as well, but evidently didn't.

 

[William Joyce]

It wasn't whites who behaved so barbarically. It was blacks. That's a fact. It's on film.

It isn't whites who run New Orleans. It's blacks. They have a black mayor, a black government and a black police force. That's a fact.

I think what's so painful for the liberal/MSM media is that all their years of bashing whites as evil and blacks as innocent and downtrodden is starting to crumble. Fewer and fewer whites look at those photographs and watch that film and read those accounts and feel the "white guilt" they're supposed to feel. So they're going ballistic blaming whites, hoping they'll feel guilty, as always. But it's not working any more than the evacuation plan. Whites look at that and think, first, what a bunch of black animals. Second, I'm glad I'm not there with them. And third, I'm going to stay away from large numbers of blacks because on the slightest provocation, they'll go ape and kill me.

Is it just me, or is the levee holding up the fantasy of racial equality starting to break?