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Jewish World Review Sept. 15, 2005 / 11 Elul, 5765 Katrina's colorblind relief By Jeff Jacoby
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The slimy and toxic water covering much of New Orleans does not stink nearly as much as the slimy and toxic accusation that help didn't reach the victims of Hurricane Katrina quickly enough because most of those victims were black.
It is a sickening slander, especially since there is no evidence to back it up. Worse than sickening: It is hateful. It is a libel spread not in a spirit of constructive criticism, but to inflame racial bitterness — bitterness toward American society generally and toward the Bush administration in particular. Already, a new poll by the Pew Research Center finds that two-thirds of black Americans think the government would have responded faster if most of the victims had been white.
Why wouldn't they think it? For nearly two weeks that false charge has been leveled over and over, sometimes with breathtaking malice and irresponsibility:
''I saw 5,000 African-Americans on the I-10 causeway," Jesse Jackson told CNN. ''It looked like Africans in the hull of a slave ship." He repeated that incendiary comparison a few days later, adding the ugly allegation that when churches were contacted about helping some of the victims, the first thing they wanted to know was, ''Are they black or white?"
Randall Robinson, the former head of TransAfrica, wrote on the blog The Huffington Post: ''It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive. . . . This is what we have come to. This defining watershed moment in America's racial history." He concluded that America could finally be seen ''for what it really is. A monstrous fraud." Robinson later retracted his insane cannibalism charge — but said that he stands ''behind everything else I wrote without reservation."
Rapper Kanye West went on a tirade during NBC's hurricane relief telethon. ''I hate the way they portray us in the media," he began. The arrival of National Guardsmen in New Orleans meant that ''they've given them permission to go down and shoot us. . . . George Bush doesn't care about black people."
A syndicated cartoon by Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution showed a crowded bus upended in the floodwaters, Uncle Sam at the wheel and a US flag emblazoned on its side. While black passengers drown in the vehicle's submerged rear, the whites up front stay dry and safe. That this is no accident is made clear by Luckovich's Jim Crow-evoking title: ''Back of the bus."
This America-as-lethally-racist theme is as factually dishonest as it is morally grotesque. No one denies that most of those stranded in New Orleans were black, but that is because two-thirds of the city's residents — 326,000 out of a population of 485,000 — were black. By the same token, most of those who got out before the disaster struck were also black.
Katrina devastated more than black-majority Orleans Parish. Four other Louisiana parishes and three coastal Mississippi counties, all with substantial white majorities, suffered heavily too. Government relief reached them no faster than it did New Orleans. If this were truly a racist country, it would have.
But those with an interest in perpetuating the idea that the chief cause of black misfortune is an American culture that ''doesn't care about black people" decry racism whether it exists or not. ''The ugly truth," declared Democratic chairman Howard Dean, ''is that skin color, age, and economics played a significant role in who survived and who did not." Likewise US Representative Barbara Lee, a California Democrat: ''If anyone ever doubted that there are two Americas, this disaster and our government's shameful response to it have made the division clear for all to see."
Well, there are two Americas. One is the America of Lee, Dean, and Jackson, in which color is paramount and no time is the wrong time to play the race card. The other is the America that has opened its hearts and wallets in a torrent of generosity and compassion for Katrina's victims. As of Monday, reports the Chronicle of Philanthropy, more than $760 million had been donated, a pace of giving without precedent in American history. And that includes only monetary contributions. There are also the immense offerings of in-kind goods of every description — clothing, food, medicine, dishes, telephones, toys. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers have enlisted in the relief effort. Americans across the country have opened their homes to evacuees from New Orleans. In the words of a Red Cross spokeswoman, ''People are just pouring their hearts out."
And all without the slightest regard to race.
Americans of every color are helping Americans of every color, loving their neighbors as themselves, and proving by their selflessness yet again that racism is dead as a force in mainstream American life.
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Jeff Jacoby is a Boston Globe columnist. Comment by clicking here. © 2005, Boston Globe |
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