September 19, 2005
"Why should I be taxed to support those people?"
by Liza Sabater
Excerpt from The Unofficial Paul Krugman Web Page | Tragedy in Black and White remixed :
By three to one, African-Americans believe that federal aid took so long to arrive in New Orleans in part because the city was poor and black. By an equally large margin, whites disagree.
The truth is that there's no way to know. Maybe President Bush would have been mugging with a guitar the day after the levees broke even if New Orleans had been a mostly white city. Maybe Palm Beach would also have had to wait five days after a hurricane hit before key military units received orders to join rescue operations.
But in a larger sense, the administration's lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina had a lot to do with race. For race is the biggest reason the United States, uniquely among advanced countries, is ruled by a political movement that is hostile to the idea of helping citizens in need.
Race, after all, was central to the emergence of a Republican majority: essentially, the South switched sides after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Today, states that had slavery in 1860 are much more likely to vote Republican than states that didn't.
And who can honestly deny that race is a major reason America treats its poor more harshly than any other advanced country? To put it crudely: a middle-class European, thinking about the poor, says to himself, "There but for the grace of God go I." A middle-class American is all too likely to think, perhaps without admitting it to himself, "Why should I be taxed to support those people?"
Text via Atrios
Videos via Crooks and Liars
Images via all over the net.
Posted by Liza Sabater in Conservatism, Dominionism, Emergency Preparedness, Extremists, FEMA, Fascism, George W. Bush, Government, Human Rights, Hurricane Katrina, Identity Politics, Morality, Poverty, Prejudice, Privilege, Race, Racism, Republicans
Permalink |
Comments (2)
| TrackBack (0) | Technorati Cosmos
Trackbacks
Trackback for this post:http://www.culturekitchen.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/3305
The following blogs make reference to this post :
Say it loud, say it proud!
It should be noted, probably, that the story about the guy's mother dying after days of frantic phonecalls, which formed the emotional climax of Aaron Broussard's Meet the Press apperance, appears to have been significantly embellished.
Tom Rodrigue's mother died in the flooding at St. Rita's nursing home on Monday, August 29. Broussard tearfully described phonecalls having taken place with the woman on the ensuing Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
I'm open to other interpretations, but it seems to me that the likeliest explanation for this is that Broussard intentionally altered the story to make it more damning of the federal disaster-response effort. In fact, Rodrigue's mother's death apparently had nothing to do with the slow federal response to Katrina, but instead was the result of the nursing home's operators (who have been charged with criminally negligent homicide) decision not to evacuate before the storm.
2
Comment by: Alex at September 20, 2005 07:28 PM
To put it crudely: a middle-class European, thinking about the poor, says to himself, "There but for the grace of God go I."
Have you spent much time in Europe? The housing projects surrounding Paris, the citees, populated mostly by north African immigrants, are every bit as squalid and dangerous as the (now underwater) Lafitte Projects in New Orleans. There is just as much suspicion, tension, and, yes, crime, between white French people and the Arab population among them as there is between American whites and blacks.
And if you think Europeans are any more enlightened on racial issues than Americans, fashionable though it may be among American leftists to think so, you're sadly mistaken. There are two things Europeans can't stand, for instance: ethnic prejudice and gypsies.
1
Comment by: John Callender at September 19, 2005 05:43 PM