I do wonder how this affair will affect race relations in the future.
From watching the news, it does appear some blacks are living up to some stereotypes. We have a city in crisis, and rather than pull together and make the best of a situation, you have looting within 24 hours of the disaster. You had virtual warzones in the streets (where cops once refused to go), rapes, murders, and destruction in the shelters (meant to help the people), shooting at rescue workers and copters (which I hope turns out to be an urban legend).
When I was watching it with some friends visiting from the Philippines, they were asking me why only the blacks were causing problems, and not trying to help the situation. Quite blunt: didn’t even bother with the “I don’t mean to sound racist” disclaimer. If people from outside the country who aren’t exposed to our stereotypes observed this, what about others?
The people who stayed in New Orleans were the people who couldn’t get out. It was a city with 30% poverty rate and for various reasons, in urban areas in the United States, blacks are often those in poverty.
HubZilla. Gee, I hope the stereotype is that “some people, perhaps especially poor blacks who have for generations lived in poverty since slavery and good reason not to have faith in the U.S. government, will do anything to survive in a crisis, damn what some people sitting snug, dry, fed and safe in their homes in fucking Hawaii think.”
You’ve seen this, right? You understand that those people who receive public assistance and work governmental jobs are paid on the first of the month? This might be why people didn’t have their pantries bursting full of canned goods and bottled water when Katrina hit, and the subsequent levee broke. Somehow, White people engaged in the same subsistence behavior are finders, while Black people are looters. See a problem here?
You also had men and women working together to rescue neighbors, move children to safety. I know these aren’t sexy stories, but it did happen. You also had some lawless Black thug steal a bus who then went joyriding with 70 of his buddies to Houston.
And of course other people thought it was good sport to shoot at choppers. Does this even make sense to you? Can you think of a reason why someone might fire a shot from a roof? Maybe to get the attention of choppers that repeatedly flew over? Is it the best idea? Maybe not, but people were desperate. (If you’re interested in actually learning about the experience from a first-hand account of a survivor, go here and click on the “Charmaine Neville: New Orleans Evacuee” link at the bottom of the page.) I guess if you were on a roof witnessing alligators eat people and babies’ bodies floating past, you might have come up with a better plan.
I would expect, as a Doper, you would look for the story behind the story, and help your visitors from the Philippines understand. Just as I’m not going to assume that all Filipino politicians are corrupt because two of the three I’ve known of in my life appear to be so, you could have helped your friends understand that the media doesn’t always present the full story. But it sounds like you already had your mind made up…
Couldn’t find the link, but I saw her interview live and she was clearly either in a mental breakdown or lying. If her account had been turned in as a movie script it would have been turned down as being unrealistic.
Why in the world would you claim that people in foreign lands, (particularly foreign lands that are huge markets for U.S. enterrtainment) are not exposed to the same types of stereotypes that get loaded into many of our productions? And, based on a presumption that news networks in other countries also follow the “it bleeds, it leads” tactics of U.S. journalism, why would you assume that their exposure to those stererotypes also do not follow U.S. stereotypes? (L.A. riots, for example.)
Given that you apparently could not adequately explain that the vast majority of people who were left in N.O. were black, meaning that both the victims and perpetrators of a breakdown in society were most likely to be the same color (and given that you have ignored that massive looting was also reported in Mississippi, but the film crews did not bother to keep the images of that “better mixed” population of lawbreakers), I would say that you seem to have missed quite a few facts. However, given that none of these facts have gone unreported in the media, I am surprised that you were not already aware of them.
Can you elaborate on the claim that it is clear that she is mentally unbalanced or lying? If the former, I would assume you have some advanced experience in the mental health field, sufficient to be able to make such a diagnosis from one videotaped interview. If the latter, well, it seems to me that in order to be able to substantiate a claim of lying * you would need to be able to demonstrate that the claims were unbelievable*, or that the one lying stood to* gain* from the lies, or that the one lying had a history of lying and was therefore unreliable.
Or just maybe, she seemed upset because she had just gone through the most incomprehensibly horrible experience of her life and was feeling a little shaken.
I can hope that many can learn from this tragedy and improve race relations. I am sad to say that many I know are looking past the fact that most of the victims are black, but instead are focusing on the negative images we have seen. Some of these people have gone so far as to say that some of these people weathered the storm for the sole purpose of looting the stores when everyone was gone.
Tragedies bring out the best and worst in people. We’ve seen plenty of evidence of this on these very boards. I’m doing my best not to rush to judgment, but I’ve had my moments when I haven’t succeeded. But we all have an opportunity to move on after this tragedy and examine what happened, as well as our own reactions and the reactions of others.