My husband remembers when he was a young boy and Dr. Martin Luther King was going to be going through Jackson, Mississippi in the “Freedom Ride” across the South. He says this is when he realized how crazy people were.
People all over the neighborhood, the schools, the church were saying that Dr. King’s buses carried people with machine guns and that they were shooting every white person they saw on the streets so when they came to town, go in your house, close your drapes and don’t come out.
If you did come out, after all, or keep the drapes open, you might see they weren’t carrying machine guns after all.
My husband went to his father and asked him about what he was hearing, because he thought it was nuts, and his father reassured him it was all lies and not to pay any attention to it.
Racism. I wrote yesterday of how my husband’s mother’s family is from Washington Parish in Louisiana. Some in Franklinton.
Today I noticed someone had reached this blog by doing a Technorati search for “Franklinton”. I went to look at some of those results. I wasn’t too amazed by what I found because of the racism I’d seen come out on some forums concerned with the hurricane, very little of it up front and loud, but a good bit of it cagey, discreet, the word “black” never mentioned, but absolutely understood in rampant rumors, told as truth, of looters run amok all over southern Louisiana, raping, killing, and carjacking.
But this racism was hosted by Fox. It’s a Fox Fan First Person blog of a woman, Michele, who fled to Orlando with her children, leaving behind her husband in St. Tammany Parish (next to Washington Parish and Franklinton was mentioned at one point, thus the visitor to my blog). They had a home on the lake which was destroyed. On 8/31 she posted of the generosity of people, for they have been given a trailer and generator, supplies, gas and food. She purchased a truck to send supplies to her husband who was asking for food, ice and water and the next day her brother-in-law left to take the supplies to her husband. She promised to take her children to Disneyworld. On 9/2 she wrote,
I just saw an interview where a woman was complaining about being in the Superdome. She was upset because they didn’t heat up her MRE. At least she had food. My husband and dad didn’t have any food until we sent some to them. They called us begging us for food.
Michele, if she ever comes across this, will probably say she’s not racist but I’d like her to please think about this. Yes, it’s harsh that she lost her home and belongings. I know she’s in shock. But she might want to consider the great charity she’s been the recipient of before criticizing a woman for wanting a hot meal. This is a woman who has been enduring the sweltering, squalor of the Superdome for probably 6 or 7 days (if she entered the Superdome last Saturday or Sunday), who has not had food or water, who has not had anyone to bring her food or water, who has been using a stairway as a toilet, who has also lost everything. Michele criticized her for wanting a hot meal and complained that no one brought her own husband food and that she had to send it to him, when they’d had a trailer and generator and fuel and food donated? When they had transportation and she was able to go out and buy a truck? And take the kids to Disneyworld? She could criticize a woman, stranded in the god-awful Superdome, for wanting a hot meal after a week?
Michele ought to consider if she might be racist. Perhaps she feels that this woman, stranded in the Superdome, is one of the individuals she considers to be “taking advantage”, as she wrote in the 9/2 blog:
If you do research on New Orleans, you will see that it is a beautiful but very dangerous city, even prior to Katrina. There are some legit people who need help, but some are just taking advantage.
And then there was Michele’s “island” solution to the problem that is New Orleans. On 8/31 she wrote:
I am so angry. How dare these people start shooting at helicopters that are trying to rescue them! I am worried to death about my dad, my husband, and both my brothers-in-law that we sent with supplies. Things should not get that bad in Slidell. Don’t get me wrong, things are bad, but civil unrest is totally uncalled for. If they are looting supplies to feed themselves, then let them go. If they are shooting and looting just because they can, then police should shoot first. I have been warning my husband of all the carjackings. The only thing that is keeping my family and friends safe is that the bridge from Slidell to New Orleans was destroyed.
That one really took me aback. She is writing about the Twin Span bridge that collapsed into Lake Pontchartrain. She is writing about the major artery into the city, and one that had it been preserved would have made evacuation a hell of a lot easier–that’s if the government had decided to get its butt into gear and use the bridge, because considering their response, they may not have.
Michele is saying that she is grateful that New Orleans was made into an island of tens of thousands of suffering people, mostly black people, because of her terror of gangs (i.e. black people) coming over the bridge and into her flooded neighborhood?
Get the theme here? She feels black people will threaten her family and her flooded home. She has been shown great charity but feels a black woman in the Superdome who wants a heated meal is being ungrateful. Essentially she feels this woman has stolen from her, since no one brought her husband food and she had to send it to him. And then she amazingly feels that some people trapped in New Orleans are just “taking advantage”.
Taking advantage of what? They were dying. They had no food, no water, no bathrooms, no beds, left exposed to disease, children dying of heat exhaustion, elderly dying, without medical attention. Michele filled her family’s prescriptions while the people in New Orleans sat among dead bodies and excrement with no medical attention for their injuries. That is some crazy kind of “taking advantage” if you’re willing to die for an MRE.
Yep, racism. The same kind of racism that visited this insult on survivors from New Orleans.
Evacuees forced to wait outside bus station
By Allen Powell II
River Parishes bureauSeveral dozen New Orleans residents seeking transportation out of Baton Rouge Saturday were denied entrance to the Greyhound bus station on Florida Street. Instead, the would-be travelers say they were forced to wait outside on the sidewalk for hours.
The travelers, many of them recent evacuees from New Orleans, waited for the chance to buy tickets to Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and northern Louisiana.
Several of them said they had been waiting at the station since the early afternoon and by 7 p.m. hadn’t been allowed to wait inside, use bathroom facilities or get water. Many of the travelers said they only wanted to purchase tickets or pick-up tickets that had already been purchased by family members.
Terrance Pierre, who said he was evacuated from Xavier University on Wednesday, said he had been waiting outside of the station for more than five hours to purchase a ticket to Texas. Pierre said he was just trying to reunite with his family and friends.
“I’m just trying to get a ticket with my own money,†he said.
Through security guards at the station, the bus station’s manager declined to discuss why the people were not allowed inside.
Travelers said they were told that there had been a disturbance at the bus station on Friday, but that could not confirmed with station employees. In addition, they said they were told that the bus station’s booking system was not operating.
Officials from Greyhound’s national office could not be reached for comment on Saturday night.
Although the crowd appeared orderly, six Baton Rouge police cruisers arrived at the station at about 7:20 p.m… A security guard at the door told officers that some people in the crowd had been banging on the station’s doors, a claim all of the travelers vehemently denied.
No one was arrested, and the officers left after instructing travelers to line up along the front of the building. After the officers left, bus station employees began allowing some people to enter the station to use the restroom, but most were forced to remain outside.
Now, the article never says “black” but I seriously doubt there was a single white person in that group of people. I imagine they were all black. The article mentions Xavier University, but it needn’t have given that clue. Recent evacuees from New Orleans who needed bus tickets is the give-away.
The swarming police response to one random midweek street crime downtown, near the River Center arena being used as a shelter for 5,000 New Orleans evacuees, had sent rumors flying through East Baton Rouge Parish (Louisiana’s equivalent of a county) of “civil unrest” – the term used by Louisiana State University Chancellor Sean O’Keefe. The chancellor sent a campuswide e-mail urging people on campus to stay inside and lock their doors.
Holden, the city’s first black mayor, said Baton Rouge would not tolerate the “New Orleans thugs” he saw looting on CNN, while his top aide told the city’s daily newspaper that the goal was to decrease the number of people in Baton Rouge’s public shelters as soon as possible. But the number keeps rising.
Source: Refugees overflowing Baton Rouge
That number, however, isn’t going to include the displaced who are shipped to points beyond even if they have friends or relatives with whom they would prefer to live:
In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them – Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge. You had no choice but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come within 17 miles of the camp.
Source: Disaster constructed out of racism, neglect and incompetence
We hear a lot about the good will of the accepting of these survivors of Katrina into the surrounding communities and nationwide. A record amount of donations has been made.
This is true.
But these survivors are predominantly black for a reason and that reason shouldn’t be glossed and denied with the current outpouring of good will. There is more going on here than the callous, cruel capitalist policies of federal conservatives rendering these individuals without protection. There is also ongoing a crisis of the history of slavery followed by the crushing alienation of slave-wage poverty fostered by local racism. A racism which is not so very localized, the federal government not simply abandoning the people of New Orleans but cordoning them off from help, such as the life-saving assistance of the Red Cross, creating an island of desolation and death which had nothing to do with the flood waters and instead was a loathsome stigmatizing of the survivors and a bizarre act of psychological violence upon them, the intended result of which I am yet unable to fully comprehend, the rationale behind it.
Whatever, it was barbaric. And if you examine the fears of the surrounding parishes, the rumors of rapes and murders run riot, one sees long-festering racism helping to fuel them. The same racism that in the 50s and 60s had whites talking of black people on the “Freedom Ride” carrying machine guns. In the 50s and 60s it was certainly, even if unvoiced, a fear of retaliation for the horrors subjected on slaves and then African-Americans held in bondage by slave-labor. And those economic, social and cultural devides were justified by white supremacy which held itself genetically and culturally superior.
A few days prior to Katrina, supposed “scientists” in Britain were announcing that men were intellectually superior to women, according to IQ tests, these same scientists being those who have worked to spread the vicious lie of white genetic and cultural superiority, who have said that African blacks have little to offer and African-Americans only a little more because of their racial mixing with whites which they hold elevated their IQ. This is no novel view, either. It’s used to explain away the economic deprivations of African-Americans as being genetically and culturally their fault. It’s used to justify the legacy of bondage. Thus does racism justify its isolationist practices and privilege justify its ascendance as natural.
That racism and privilege would carry that bondage so far as to have an individual voicing on Fox Fan First Person their gratitude that the bridge over Lake Pontchetrain had collapsed, thus “protecting” Slidell from New Orleans.
The supreme violence of the privileged is, as in the 50s and 60s, to close its doors and windows, to the truth.
Baton Rouge: A city under stress
September 2, 2005
By John Hill
jhillbr@gannett.comBATON ROUGE — Louisiana’s capital city burst at the seams Thursday as thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims, relief workers and volunteers from throughout the nation steadily streamed into what is now the state’s largest metropolis.
East Baton Rouge City-Parish officials estimate the population of Baton Rouge could double within a week. They pleaded for federal assistance.
Rumors of looting and violent crime sprees spread by the hour, prompting Mayor Kip Holden’s office to issue a public statement saying only one person had been arrested for shoplifting.
All apartments have been rented; commercial and residential real estate markets are booming. Cell phone systems are overloaded, streets are filled with traffic, lines have formed at gasoline stations and homes and all available public buildings are full of refugees.
…
“Until the hurricane, we had a parish of 413,000 people, a city of 250,000,” Chief Administrative Officer Walter Monsour said. “Within a week or so, we’re going to be double that. And, to that extent, we’re going to need federal help.”
Baseless rumors about massive disorder in Baton Rouge have circulated widely, possibly fueled by a massive police presence downtown ordered by Holden as a precaution.
“I want to make sure that some of these thugs and looters that are out shooting officers in New Orleans don’t come here and do the same,” he said Thursday afternoon. “I am not going to allow a New Orleans situation, shooting at people and looting, to happen here in Baton Rouge.”
Holden called for additional police and National Guard members to assist overtaxed law enforcement officers.
He also wants to ensure storm refugees are safe in Baton Rouge shelters, which are equipped with airport-like security, including metal detectors.
The mayor’s executive assistant was working to stop widely circulating rumors that evacuees were behaving violently.
“They are not hijacking cars, there are no machine guns, they are not raiding Wal-Mart,” said Hampton Grunewald. “The rumors have gotten worse today.”
Groups of evacuees did roam downtown streets, often stopping people to ask for money.
The mayor’s office sent an e-mail to media representatives asking them to verify any incidents before reporting them and assuring everyone that if there is an incident, the city would announce it publicly as soon as possible.
A massive police presence surrounds the 5,000 evacuees from New Orleans who are housed in Baton Rouge’s River Center convention facility on the riverfront.
…
A memo LSU Chancellor Sean O’Keefe’s office sent to faculty and staff members warns of incidents of civil unrest in Baton Rouge. O’Keefe said those turned out to be isolated cases, but he wanted to warn personnel.
“This has been a lot more about rumor than fact.”
LSU System President William Jenkins said everyone is stressed.
…
With apartments snapped up, would-be renters are becoming homebuyers, local real estate agents said.
“It’s scary,” said Judy Burkett, owner of Judy Burkett Realtors. “People are buying houses without seeing them just because they think the inventory is running out.”
Malcolm Young, chief executive officer of the Louisiana Realtors Association, said his group is getting calls “probably every three minutes” from people looking to rent housing or office space. “The apartment and house rental market is probably 100 percent occupied at this time.”
Part of the pressure on the Baton Rouge market is that New Orleans legal firms, major banks and other businesses are looking to set up offices in Baton Rouge and relocate employees and their families. For example, Young said, the president of the New Orleans Association of Realtors bought two houses Wednesday.
But there still are plenty of houses for sale, Young said.
Leave a Reply