Sep 06, 2005
"They Don't Want Them Here"
As you've probably noticed, a lot of the news coming out of Louisiana makes no sense on its face. Vehicles with supplies being turned away from the city, busses sitting idle, checkpoints preventing people from leaving the city on foot. Sometimes these decisions are attributed to FEMA, sometimes to state and/or local authorities. This paragraph from an article in Salon put the situation in a little better focus for me:
"The people in Jefferson Parish," Thomas continued, referring to a mostly affluent and white area to the northwest of New Orleans, "have been very clear; they don't want (refugees from New Orleans) here." Jefferson and other neighboring parishes were also hit hard by Katrina, and many have no electricity and little or no water pressure. But while Thomas acknowledged that Jefferson had its own problems, "they wouldn't even allow their parish to be used as a staging area."
The standard post-disaster storyline, "Americans pulling together" is being disrupted in a way that the media has been unable to ignore. It took a truly bizarre circumstance that "trapped" thousands of people in the convention center, which was still completely accessible to reporters, camera men and Harry Connick Jr to knock the media off their stock script, but it has happened. The question now is, how long can they keep it up? How long will they continue to ask why things went down in New Orleans the way they did? There's a federal story, there's stories about planning done or not done at all levels, but there's also a story of dozens or hundreds of individual, uncoordinated decisions made based on fear of poor black Americans.
