The Different Faces of Racism

I was watching an interview of former President Bill Clinton this morning on The Today Show. He was asked by Matt Lauer whether he felt the response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans would have been different if the people in the Convention Center had been middle-class and white as opposed to poor and African-American. I thought his answer was excellent--I have always felt that he has a much better understanding of racial issues than the people in the current administration, who try to dismiss any connection to race. What he said was that although he did not feel that there was any conscious racism in terms of how the government responded, he did feel that in terms of being prepared, the people in charge really were not attuned to the needs of those who were disenfranchised, and that in any disaster preparedness plan, you need to take into account things like, "How are people going to get out of the city if they don't have transportation?" What he was talking about, in essence, was institutionalized racism. What we saw, in living color, were the effects of institutionalized racism.

Barack Obama characterizes the federal response to Katrina as a "continuation of passive indifference," stating that it reflects the unthinking assumption that all Americans have "the capacity to load up their family in an SUV, fill it up with $100 worth of gasoline, stick some bottled water in the trunk and use a credit card to check into a hotel on safe ground."

However, every day, I receive something in my email inbox of acts of individual racism that happened in New Orleans as well. Blatant, out and out, in your face racism. Here is yet another story from someone who survived, a lawyer named Peter Berkowitz who happened to be in New Orleans when the hurricane hit.

http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/3405/

And this week's issue of Newsweek reported this disturbing scene:

"Over the course of two days, a white river-taxi operator from hard-hit St. Bernard Parish rescued scores of people from flooded areas and ferried them to safety. All were white. 'A n--ger is a n--ger is a n--ger.' he told a Newseek reporter. Then he said it again."

Yet people are still saying race isn't an issue.

Although I didn't watch Bush's entire speech last night, apparently he did acknowledge that what happened in New Orleans exposed some ugly truths about the racial and class divide that is rooted in racial discrimination in this country. Now that he's acknowledged it, let's see what he's planning to do about it. I'm also curious to see what the right-wing pundits, who throughout the past couple weeks have insisted that race has nothing to do with it, are going to say now.