White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (40 page)

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Authors: Tim Wise

Tags: #History, #Politics, #Sociology, #Memoir, #Race

BOOK: White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son
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The media broadcast images both enraging and heartbreaking: people stranded on rooftops waiting to be rescued by helicopters; the elderly and small children sitting outside the Convention Center in the scorching August heat, no food, water, or medicine to provide relief; people wading through waist-deep water to find dry land, their clothes drenched with the fetid fluid of Lake Ponchartrain, mixed with whatever street funk had joined it on its journey downtown. They also showed us endless footage of looters, though it was often the same five or six incidents shown from different angles, giving the impression to a public already inclined to think the worst of lower-income black folks (the disproportionate composition of those left behind) that theft was more common than it really was. And there were the reports of massive violence as well: murders, rapes, and even the killing of small babies, dumped in trashcans, according to one report. That these allegations would be investigated and found almost entirely false wouldn’t matter. Most people probably never even heard that the violence claims had been debunked by five different national and international news outfits, so ready were most to believe the worst about those who had been left behind. Even fewer would probably learn of the
real
violence during those days; namely, the white vigilante terror squad that formed in the Algiers community on the city’s west bank and shot at least a dozen African Americans for being in their neighborhood—a story that wouldn’t break until 2007, and even then, would receive very little media attention.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, I spent hours browsing the comments sections of stories posted on
NOLA.com
, the main web-based news and information outlet for New Orleans, which remained operational throughout the crisis thanks to a server located outside of the city. There, one could read hundreds of hateful, even psychotically racist remarks about local area blacks. Commentators took an almost sadistic pleasure in referring to looters as “sub-human scum,” “cockroaches,” “vermin,” “animals,” “slime,” and any number of other creative and dehumanizing slurs. Others openly called for the building of a separation wall between Orleans Parish and the much whiter Jefferson Parish, if and when the area was reconstructed, so as to “keep the animals out” of the areas with “decent people.”
One poster, discussing those who were looting—even though most were taking necessities like food, water, medicine, or clothes to replace the rotting rags on their backs—wrote, in big, angry, unhinged capital letters: “TO ALL POLICE: PLEASE KILL THESE INCENSIVE (sic) FOOLS! KILL THEM ALL! WE DON’T NEED THEM ON THIS PLANET ANYMORE . . . THEY DON’T DO US ANY GOOD . . . GOD BLESS AMERICA.”
The individual who wrote those words was then outdone by another who said, “If I had my way, the National Guard would round these pieces of garbage up, make THEM clean up the mess Katrina left for us, and then machine gun the whole lot of them into the Gulf. The only good looter is a DEAD one. There are no exceptions.”
And then, from a commenter who used his real name (Jim Hassenger), so I will too, there was this: “My city is destroyed and what is left the bastards are looting . . . I don’t like living here with this disease anymore. I HATE YOU from the bottom of my heart. It’s times like these I have to fight racist thoughts.” Apparently, Jim was losing that fight.
While many refrained from comments of such a vicious nature, they nonetheless showed a disturbing insensitivity towards the suffering of those on the ground in New Orleans, calling them “unintelligent” for not evacuating. People seemed utterly oblivious to the real burdens of evacuation. If you didn’t have a car, or money, or a place to go, how were you supposed to flee? Some argued that the city should have commandeered school buses to get folks out of town, but there weren’t enough people to drive them, and they would have had no clear destination in any event. Unless the federal government mandated that hotels open their doors to the displaced and offered to pay for the rooms—which they never did—buses would have had no place to go, and few people would have agreed to just hop on them, drive into the night, and hope for the best.
Of course, sometimes when New Orleanians
did
try and flee the city, they were met with hostility and blocked from escaping. On the second day of the tragedy, a group of mostly black residents tried to walk out of the city by crossing the bridge to the west bank of the river, only to be shot at by sheriff ’s deputies from Gretna who wanted to keep blacks out of their city. And there were, of course, the African Americans on the west bank who tried to reach the pier in Algiers so as to get ferried out of the area, only to be shot by the white terror squad that presumed every black person in the neighborhood was a criminal.
Other voices suggested the city should never be rebuilt; its location, they would say, makes it too susceptible to a similar storm in the future, so it would be impractical to let people return. It’s an argument that no one ever makes about small, white, Midwestern farm towns that get blown away each year by tornadoes, or to white retirees in Florida, just because they live in a hurricane zone, but which many felt was perfectly reasonable in the case of New Orleans and the folks who lived there. Whatever compassion and decency had animated the first few hours of the catastrophe on Monday was quickly vanishing by the middle of the week.
BY THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER
1, most who were stranded at the New Orleans Convention Center had no food or potable water, and what provisions existed at the Superdome had run out, yet to be replaced by FEMA. Indeed, President Bush’s FEMA director would say later that day that he hadn’t realized there were people trapped in such centers until that morning, despite the fact that the rest of us had been looking at them on national television for seventy two hours.
When desperate folks attempted to get into food pantries at the Convention Center, knowing that the supplies would spoil and never be used for their original purposes, National Guardsmen aimed guns at them and told them to “step away from the food or we’ll blow your fucking heads off,” according to reports from those among the crowd. Things were getting uglier by the minute.
Meanwhile, I wondered why there was no apparent presence of the Red Cross in the city, either to provide relief supplies or tend to the sick and injured. There were reports of their activities throughout the rest of the Gulf Coast, and in parts of Louisiana other than New Orleans, but nothing in the Crescent City itself, which seemed bizarre. Rather than a structured relief operation, the task was falling to private citizens, like Harry Connick Jr., who drove into the city to bring supplies to the stranded when no one else would do so, or like my former boss at the Louisiana Coalition, who did the same.
Lance and his family would never flee the city, and would make several relief runs downtown, seeing first-hand the orderly and largely peaceful way in which desperate folks were behaving and trying to survive. The need for private citizens to fill the relief gap had been intensified by the absence of the Red Cross, whose absence, Lance discovered, had been deliberate—the result of a relief blockade. Though he tried to get media to cover the blockade as a story of institutional injustice, few agreed to discuss it; this, despite the fact that the evidence for the embargo was right there on the organization’s website, where one could read that, “The Department of Homeland Security continues to request that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the Hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.” Government officials, more desirous of evacuating the city than helping the sick and dying, told the premier relief group on the planet to stand down and to do nothing within New Orleans. Nowhere else in the hurricane zone was this order given, but it was there. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that the demographic makeup of the effected might have had something to do with the different levels of concern.
That afternoon, I went with Kristy and the girls to a local Mexican restaurant, La Paz, for lunch. I had been riveted to the television for the better part of three days by that point, not even going out of the house, and needed a break from the coverage. As we waited for our food to arrive, I couldn’t help but overhear the commentary emanating from the table to my left, filled with eight employees from a local call center, whose compassion for the suffering masses in New Orleans had clearly been exhausted.
The group prayed over their food—because, after all, God was responsible for the flakiness of their chimichanga—and then proceeded to heap scorn upon the people of New Orleans in ways that managed to only thinly veil the race and class bias at the heart of their critique. Between repeated “amens,” the white men and women—the former appropriately preppy and the latter appropriately made-up with big blonde hair, bangs reaching for Jesus—wondered why the people of New Orleans hadn’t left, or why they were looting, rather than helping one another, or shooting at relief helicopters (a story that turned out to be untrue—people on rooftops had been using guns as makeshift flares to gain the attention of helicopters, not to bring them down). One of the men attempted to draw a contrast between the decency of New Yorkers in the wake of 9/11 and the savagery of folks in New Orleans amid the current tragedy, and wondered why the difference? The neatlycoiffed female to his right quickly offered up an explanation.
“Well,” Buffy explained, “It’s probably because, in New Orleans, it’s mostly poor people, and they don’t have the same regard.” (Regard for what? I wondered to myself. For life? For the sanctimonious and self-righteous consumption of chips and salsa?)
She then averred that police needed to shoot all looters. As I watched guacamole tumble from her mouth, she trying hard not to accidentally scrape off any of her lipstick with the side of her tortilla chip, her tablemates praised the Lord at her suggestion. That they were not struck down (I believe the Biblical term is
smote
), right then and there, may be the best evidence one can muster that there is no God—at least not one that actively intervenes in the affairs of mankind. Because I know that if I were God, there would have been a quickly available, albeit smoldering eight-top at the Nashville La Paz that afternoon.
Our food had come by now, but my appetite had vanished. I picked at the edges of my dish, unable to shut out the cacophony of contempt a few feet away. Kris asked what was wrong but I just grunted something about not being very hungry and that I was listening to the table next to us. The kids continued to eat. After a few more minutes I looked up, unable to bear any more and told them to hurry, that I really needed to go. I knew that if I stayed there any longer and had to listen to any more of the calumnies dripping from the lips of the call center lunch bunch, I was going to end up making a scene. Four days into the tragedy—a tragedy that was devastating the place and many of the people I loved—I was on edge, and I knew it wouldn’t take much more to snap. Had I been alone or with only Kristy I might not have cared. Sometimes dumping queso on a person’s head can be cathartic. But with the girls in tow, only four and two, I knew that such aggression and the inevitable expulsion from the restaurant that would have followed would only manage to scare them. I also knew that as a writer, I had better ways to get back at them than assault, be it verbal or physical.
I was starting to shake by the time my family finished their meal and we stood up to leave. I glared at the table as we passed by but to no effect. They never looked up from their bean burritos, and never stopped speaking of the people of New Orleans as animals unworthy of concern.
I told Kris that I needed her to drive. As we pulled away from the restaurant parking lot I broke down, tears cascading down my face as my sobs turned to the early stages of hyperventilation. Rachel asked what was wrong, having never seen me cry before, and certainly not like this. Kristy tried to explain it to her.
“You know those people we saw on TV in New Orleans, where daddy used to live, who were standing on their rooftops and stuck in the water?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s so sad,” she replied, the innocence of her words breaking my heart further.
“Well, daddy’s just worried about them, and those people next to us in the restaurant were saying some mean things about the people there,” she explained.
“Why would they say mean things about them?” Ashton wondered.
“Because some people just aren’t kind,” was all I could think to say. I knew the answer was more complicated than that, and one day I’d explain it to them in greater detail. But in that instant, it would have to suffice.

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