Racial wash-out

Katrina has uncovered for many Americans the reality of black poverty in this country, and hopefully our indifference won't again replace our outrage. But the flooding of New Orleans has also uncovered the fallacy of the "New South."

Here, 80 miles northwest of New Orleans, white residents have spoken up at public meetings to oppose vehemently the construction of temporary housing for the evacuees, most of whom are black. The tension could complicate tentative plans by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to buy land in the parish for trailer lots.

"The only thing we see about these people on the news is what happened in the Superdome," said Philip Devall, 42, a white resident of Greensburg, at a recent meeting of the parish government. "They're rapists and thugs and murderers. I'm telling you, half of them have criminal records. I've worked all my life to have what I have. I can't lose it, and I can't stand guard 24 hours a day."

About 2,000 evacuees have been staying with friends and family in the parish since Hurricane Katrina, and police officials here say that crime related to the newcomers has been virtually nonexistent. But many residents say that fear is the driving force behind their opposition.

"I want to know how many sex offenders they're going to move in next to me," said Marci Kent, 36, also a white resident of Greensburg, at the meeting. "And I got daughters, too."

When one white man expressed concern at the meeting over possibly losing his valuables to lawless evacuees, a black woman turned around and angrily pointed a finger at him. "We work hard for what we got, too," she said. "But these people need a place to stay."

Sex offenders -- or, as we refer to them, young black men -- are coming from N'orlins to ravage his women folk. Wonder where he got that idea?

The racial nastiness of the morons on The Corner, Drudge, Nooners, etc. didn't need to be uncovered. But when the same people who did the most to hype the "Lord of the Flies" atmosphere inside the Superdome meme have their noses rubbed into the bullshit, who could have guessed that they would respond by saying that if the violence they were not surprised to "see" happening in New Orleans didn't happen, then the "MSM" must have hyped the flooding itself?

So is it any wonder many of the displaced in New Orleans think there's more to the flooding than just a hurricane?

The best-known writer to come from the Ninth Ward is Kalamu ya Salaam. A poet, playwright, and civil-rights activist, Salaam used to go by the name of Val Ferdinand. When I told Salaam what I was hearing in New Iberia and Houston, he laughed, but not dismissively. He said, “The real question is why not?” He recalled that in 1927, in the midst of the worst flooding of the Mississippi River in recorded history, the white city fathers of New Orleans—the men of the Louisiana Club, the Boston Club, and the Pickwick Club—won permission from the federal government to dynamite the Caernarvon levee, downriver from the city, to keep their interests dry. But destroying the levee also insured that the surrounding poorer St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes would flood. Thousands of the trappers who lived there lost their homes and their livelihoods. The promise of compensation was never fulfilled. That, plus the persistent rumors of what may or may not have happened during Hurricane Betsy, Salaam said, has had a lingering effect. “So when I heard on TV that there was a breach at the Seventeenth Street levee, I figured they’d done it again,” he said. “Or, let’s just say, I didn’t automatically assume that it was accidental.”

Lolis Eric Elie, an African-American columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, told me he didn’t believe that the levees were blown deliberately—“and most black folks with some education or money don’t, either”—but he could “easily” understand why so many were suspicious. “Blacks, in a state of essential slavery, built those very levees that were blown up in 1927. When the ships came to rescue people, whites made damn sure not to rescue blacks in Mississippi because of their fear that the blacks wouldn’t return to work the farms. If black life is not valued—and isn’t that what you were seeing for days in New Orleans?—then the specifics of the explanations are irrelevant. You begin to say to yourself, ‘How do you aid tsunami victims instantly and only three or four days later get to New Orleans? What explanation other than race can there be?’ I believe the real explanation is manifold, but I can understand how people start believing these things.”