Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (73 page)

But, to their dismay, the discourse would not quiet down. Segregationists hardly minded the animalistic Black Savior flicks, featuring physically supernatural Blacks saving Whites (
The Green Mile
, 1999); or the paternalistic White Savior flicks, featuring morally supernatural Whites saving Blacks (
The Blind Side
, 2009); or the flicks depicting amazing real-life stories of personal responsibility overcoming extreme adversity (
The Pursuit of Happyness
, 2006). But segregationists did mind Paul Haggis’s 2005 Academy Award–winning Best Picture,
Crash
, a film that intertwined the racial experiences over a two-day period of characters from every racial group except Native Americans. Each character is shown as both prejudiced and the victim of prejudice, and the characters’ prejudiced ideas and actions are depicted as stemming from both ignorance and hate. While segregationists over the years rebuked
Crash
’s explicit racial discourse, and assimilationists hailed the film’s masterful portrayal of the pervasive, illogical, and oppressive effects of individual bigotry, antiracists argued that the film left much to be desired. They critiqued especially the lack of complexity on race relations in the film and the absence of any exploration of institutional racism. In
The Atlantic
, Ta-Nehisi Coates did not temper his antiracist review, calling it the “worst film of the decade.” And for the color-blind
segregationists, John McWhorter described
Crash
as “a melodrama, not a reflection of The Real America.”
²

But it was a devastating natural and racial disaster that summer that forced a tense debate about institutional and individual racism. During the final days of August 2005, Hurricane Katrina took more than 1,800 lives, forced millions to migrate, flooded the beautiful Gulf Coast, and caused billions in property damage. Hurricane Katrina blew the color-blind roof off America and allowed all to see—if they dared to look—the dreadful progression of racism.

For years, scientists and journalists had warned that if southern Louisiana took “a direct hit from a major hurricane,” the levees could fail and the region would be flooded and destroyed, as the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
reported in 2002. Ignoring the warnings, it was almost as if politicians were hoping for a destructive hurricane to occur so that what Naomi Klein termed “disaster capitalism” could follow it. Politicians could award multimillion-dollar reconstruction contracts to corporations filling their campaign coffers, and New Orleans’s Black residents locked on prime real estate could be cleared away to make room for gentrification. Whether they actually hoped for something like Hurricane Katrina hardly mattered, because politicos and disaster capitalists (Vice President Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, for example) capitalized on the destruction. Even Klansmen got rich off their fake donation websites.
³

It was rumored that the Bush administration directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to delay its response in order to amplify the destructive reward for those who would benefit. Whether he actually did that is unknown, but it hardly mattered because FEMA did delay, and millions suffered because of it. While national reporters quickly reached the city and captured for their cameras thousands of residents of the predominantly Black Ninth Ward trapped on roofs and in the Superdome, federal officials made excuses for their delays. It took three days to deploy rescue troops to the Gulf Coast region, more time than it took to get troops on the ground to quell the 1992 Rodney King rebellion, and the result was deadly. “I
believe it was racism,” said a paramedic who witnessed the death spiral in New Orleans.
⁴

But even this was not the full story of Hurricane Katrina. The extreme disaster story of racism became an extremely racist disaster story. The Associated Press dispatched a photograph of White people carrying “bread and soda from a local grocery store,” and another photograph of a Black man who “loot[ed] a grocery store.” As babies died of infections and hurt people waited for ambulances, reporters broadcasted sensational stories of “babies in the Convention Center who got their throats cut” in a crime-saturated city of “armed hordes” hijacking ambulances and “refugees” seeking shelter. Libertarian journalist Matt Welch did not mince words or the truth when he declared that the “deadly bigotry” of the media probably helped “kill Katrina victims.” Federal officials and nearby emergency personnel used these media reports to justify their delays—citing the dangers of sending aid and personnel with so many people looting “gun stores” and shooting “at police, rescue officials and helicopters.” Racist Americans actually reported, circulated, and believed the outrageous lies of those who were saying that Black people in a disaster zone would shoot at the very people coming to help them.

No one summed up the class racism of the government and media response to Hurricane Katrina victims better than Lani Guinier of Harvard Law School. “Poor Black people are the throw-away people. And we pathologize them in order to justify our disregard,” she said. And no one summoned up the raw feelings of antiracist Blacks better than the superstar rapper who had just released his second studio album,
Late Registration
. “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” Kanye West boldly stated, deviating from his script during a live hurricane relief concert on NBC on September 2, 2005. By mid-September 2005, the pollsters were rushing out to check the pulse of American racism. In one national poll, only 12 percent of White Americans—but 60 percent of African Americans—agreed that “the federal government’s delay in helping the victims in New Orleans was because the victims were black.” Presumably, the minds of 88 percent of White
Americans and 40 percent of Black Americans—if the poll was representative—had been flooded by racist ideas.

In the era of color-blind racism, no matter how gruesome the racial crime, no matter how much evidence was stacked against them, racists were standing up before the judge and claiming “not guilty.” But how many criminals actually confess when they don’t have to? From “civilizers” to standardized testers, assimilationists have rarely confessed to racism. Enslavers and Jim Crow segregationists went to their graves claiming innocence. George W. Bush will likely do the same. “I faced a lot of criticism as president,” Bush mused in his post-presidency memoir. “I didn’t like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low.”
⁵

Into the fall and winter of 2005, antiracist charges of racism in New Orleans were met with racist charges of “the irresponsible use of the race card,” to quote Black media personality Larry Elder. Into 2006, the producers of racist ideas were arguing that the charges of widespread discrimination in New Orleans, and in the United States, were fabricated or overblown. The United States was color blind, and the Black people charging discrimination were lying—they were playing their race cards.
⁶

It was in this polarized post-Katrina racial climate that Crystal Mangum stripped at a party for Duke University’s White lacrosse team. After the party, in March 2006, the Black single mother and college student went to the Durham police. Team members had shouted racial epithets before forcing her into a room and gang-raping her, Mangum told police. Investigators then intercepted and released a post-party email. I wanted “to have some strippers over,” Ryan McFadyen told his teammates. “I plan on killing the bitches” and cutting “their skin off while cumming in my duke issue spandex.” As the Durham district attorney filed charges, the case became a national story. The national antiracist, anti-rape, and antisexist community rose up to support Crystal Mangum. “Regardless of the result of the police investigation,” eighty-eight Duke professors said in a full-page advertisement in the
Duke Chronicle
on April 6, 2006, “what is apparent every
day now is the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism.”

By 2007, the case against the lacrosse players had fallen apart. Physical and DNA evidence had exonerated them of misconduct, and revelations of drug use, promiscuous sex, and mental health problems had smeared Crystal Mangum. When it was revealed that she had lied about being raped, everything seemed to turn upside down. The Durham district attorney was fired and disbarred. The players sued the city. Racists and sexists used her case to try to silence the post-Katrina discussion of racism as well as the discussion of rape culture that flowed from her allegation. It was said that Duke’s antiracist, antisexist, antipoverty professors had exploited the case for propaganda.

Crystal Mangum’s lies were generalized to all Black people, all women, and especially all Black women. Racists started waving their race cards, explaining that Black people had been fabricating and exaggerating the amount of racial discrimination all along. Sexists started waving “rape” cards, charging that women had been fabricating and exaggerating the amount of sexual violence all along. Gender racists combined the race and rape cards to dismiss the integrity of Black women claiming to be victims of racialized sexual violence. It was as if all Black women had done something wrong in Durham, North Carolina. And then the race and rape reformers felt betrayed—especially the men—and they started to belittle Crystal Mangum for setting the anti-rape and antiracist movements back, by giving rapists and racists more of the rape and race cards they loved to play. Her lies would make it more difficult for them to persuade away rapist and racist ideas, to convince Whites to acknowledge their racism, and to convince men to acknowledge their rape culture. Ironically, as these reformers condemned Mangum for her folly, foolish tactics of trying to persuade (instead of force) offenders to stop their crimes against humanity were setting rape culture and racism back.
⁷

OUTSIDE THE MARX HOTEL
in Syracuse, New York, antiwar activists were demonstrating against the US occupation of Iraq. Freezing
rain dropped on their heads as they carried on. “You are not fair-weather activists!” Angela Davis proclaimed on October 20, 2006. Davis invited the demonstrators to hear her plenary speech at Syracuse University’s “Feminism and War” conference. Many obliged. Davis lectured on how certain concepts had been “colonized” by the Bush administration, which had used “democracy,” for example, in speeches about the need to “liberate” the women of Iraq and Afghanistan. “Diversity” had been used by the government, the military, and the prisons to present themselves as the most “diverse” institutions in history. But the oppressors were hiding behind their “diversity” and keeping their institutional racism intact, Davis proclaimed. It was a “difference that doesn’t make a difference.” Democracy and diversity were becoming as caustic to the antiracist cause as “race card” and “personal responsibility.”
⁸

Civil rights activists, however, remained fixated on the “N-word,” especially after an N-word-laced rant went viral of
Seinfeld
actor Michael Richards confronting Black audience members during a standup at Hollywood’s Laugh Factory on November 17, 2006. The outrage over Richards’s “He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger!” blended in the spring with the outrage over talk-show host Don Imus describing the dark-skinned members of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.” The outrage did not just reflect on Richards and Imus. “It is us,” Fox Sports journalist Jason Whitlock wrote in the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
on April 16, 2007. “At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youth to buy into a culture”—by which he meant Hip Hop—that “is anti-black, anti-education, pro-drug dealing and violent.”
⁹

At its annual convention in early July 2007, the NAACP held a public funeral and burial of the N-word. But “race card,” “personal responsibility,” “color blind,” “no excuses,” “achievement gap,” and “it is us” were all allowed to live on in the dictionary of racism. “This was the greatest child that racism ever birthed,” the Reverend Otis Moss III said in his eulogy for the N-word. All of the hurricane deaths in New Orleans from the womb of racism—and the N-word was the greatest child? Months earlier, on November 25, 2006, New
York police officers had slaughtered the twenty-three-year-old Sean Bell on his wedding night. Shortly thereafter, the excessive criminal charges against six Black high school students in Jena, Louisiana, were announced for their alleged crime of beating up a noose-hanging, racial-epithet-throwing White classmate. Days before the N-word funeral, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had struck down the efforts of three communities to desegregate their schools, saying that the “way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” And the N-word was the greatest child of racism? “Die N-word,” Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick ordered at the funeral. But nothing was said about racism’s other, even more monstrous children.
¹⁰

“HE’S THE FIRST
mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Presidential hopeful and Delaware senator Joe Biden might as well have labeled Barack Obama the extraordinary Negro. Biden’s evaluations of his presidential rivals appeared in the
New York Observer
days before Obama stood in front of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois, and formally announced his presidential candidacy on February 10, 2007. Obama stood on the spot where Abraham Lincoln had delivered his historic “House Divided” speech in 1858. Obama brimmed with words of American unity, hope, and change.