In a nutshell, here’s the basic breakdown of the overall descriptive representation of the victims of Hurricane Katrina,
as described by Establishment Television News:

WHITE PEOPLE: escapees, survivors, casualties, adapting, finding food for survival, triumphant and resilient victims.

BLACK PEOPLE: refugees, killers, rapists, thugs, looting, stealing food for survival, pathetic and helpless victims.

Yes, I do think that is a fucked up thing. No, you’re not being overly judgmental, that WAS how the shit was being
played out.

When Kanye West broke away from the teleprompter during NBC’s “A Concert for Hurricane Relief,” and started to tell the nation what he REALLY thought about the situation down in the Gulf Coast, he was just saying what too many of us were thinking of at home. "I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family, it says they're looting. See a white family, it says they're looking for food." Yup. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Here’s the (mostly) black people of the New Orleans Superdome slowly starving and thirsting to death, wondering what the HELL happened to the evacuation that was promised, among dead bodies and the stench of backed up toilets, and then let’s cut to Mississippi, where the (just about all) white folks are mugging their somehow freshly scrubbed faces for the camera as they push their fully loaded carts out of fuckin’ Lowe’s Hardware declaring, “yeah, wanna tell my kinfolks in (insert name of quaint lil’ mostly Caucasian town here) that we all right, everybody’s ooookay.” Cut to New Orleans cops grabbing their fellow ethnic minority citizens by the collar, making them dump their pile of freshly acquired goods, and then tossing them into the toxic lake of floodwaters in the street. Then let’s segue to yet another town and talk to some clean cut ol’ WASP gent warmly cooing over “Big Bertha”, or whatever he called the shotgun in his hand, and telling anecdotes suggesting to the effect that “she” makes him feel safe from “certain o’them kinds of people.”

Then we have fuckin’ Dubya (who took two whopping days off his vacation time just to get his ass in gear and get down to the disaster site) eventually showing up and bellying up for the prime photo op. Oh, look at our POTUS warmly embracing not one, but TWO African-American ladies! Hear him as he gently gives them fatherly kissies on the forehead. Then he hops over to New Orleans and takes a quick looksee at the “progress” on the levee repairs, then makes some feel-good rhetorical observations from the portable Presidential press podium at the airport before getting the Hell out of there.

In the coming months, we’ll be hearing and seeing the spotlight on the “heroes” who stepped up to the challenge of rescuing and aiding all of these poor people, many of whom lost everything, and realistically, Mother Nature tends not to discriminate with anyone in her path. But I put forth the sentiment that the REAL heroes are the thousands who lawfully and peacefully showed up at the locations where they were instructed to go, only to be left on the shelf for days at a time, and yet somehow staying alive until Uncle Sam finally got his shit together and shifted the aid machine into gear.

To add a fitting final note to my rant, I leave you with this brief snippet from a story by Mary Foster of the Associated Press re: the final evacuation from the Superdome:

"At one point Friday, the evacuation was interrupted briefly when school buses pulled up so some 700 guests and employees from the (nearby Hyatt Regency) hotel could move to the head of the evacuation line — much to the amazement of those who had been crammed in the Superdome since last Sunday."

Gee! What do you suppose was the ethnic profile of most of THOSE folks, eh?



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