Racism and Katrina

Keep Katrina in context. Hurricane Katrina was not just a hurricane. It was a huge hurricane, aimed at a major city, combined with the worst urban flooding in US history. It was exacerbated by city and state officials who did not do their “first responder” job, or even follow their own flood plan. Katrina was easily the worst natural disaster America has suffered. Katrina’s damage exceeded what the combined city, state, and federal emergency response will ever be prepared to handle well. For disasters this huge, we simply accept it will be a disaster, and it will take days or weeks to ameliorate it.

New Orleans’ worst flooding happened to inundate an area that is almost entirely black. The disaster was bigger than any emergency response plan could ever adequately handle. Therefore, most of those who suffered for days were black. It’s just the logic of the facts, not racism.

It is racism, however, to prey on others’ ignorance to translate the simple facts of Katrina’s devastation into an intentional lack of compassion or rescue of those hurt by Katrina. Yes; those biased complaints are the only racism in the picture.

To make the point by analogy:

If the San Andreas fault slips in a series of huge earthquakes near north Los Angeles, first responders won’t be able to put out fires, rescue people trapped by rubble, control crime, stabilize teetering buildings, open the roads, provide fresh water, and give medical assistance to all the area’s inhabitants for many days. People will die because of a lack of enough rescue resources immediately available. Will Los Angelenos complain that their plight is the fault of the earthquake, or of anti-Hollywood bias?

If the series of earthquakes strikes south of San Francisco, will the locals blame the earthquakes, or the federal government’s anti-silicon valley bias against scientists?

If terrorists manage to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb in Chicago, it will take days to control the situation, and months to clean up. Will Americans of Polish descent claim a federal plan to exterminate them, or will they blame the terrorists?

If a large meteorite devastates Wyoming, will the suffering be blamed on the democrat party's antagonism toward family-value conservatives, or on the natural disaster?

If a hurricane and levee breach cause a predominately poor, black neighborhood to flood to historic levels, it will take days for the federal agencies to reach everyone who refused to evacuate when ordered. Will they blame their local officials’ flood response, themselves for staying in an evacuation area, or the will they blame the federal agencies, who responded as soon as the local officials allowed them?

If a poor black area is hit by disaster, and rescue agencies from outlying areas respond, TV coverage will show blacks needing rescue by whites. Is that a racist slant in media coverage, or just the effects of where the disaster occurred?

The extremist liberals’ race-baiting blame game will fail. Their racism is obvious. It will become this generation’s best-known example of abuse of the poor, of encouraging ignorance, of fostering racial hate, of the dirty side of political power plays. The extremists will deserve their plight, unlike the poor people of New Orleans.