Spring Break
Lessons forgotten
What Hurricane Katrina taught us about race in America
Steve Markley, Senior Staff Writer
Issue date: 2/24/06 Section: OpEd Page
For a change, I'd like to talk about something uncontroversial: Why George W. Bush is an unbridled racist.
Put the pen down, holster your scathing e-mail and let me explain. In the last week while most of the media has been wondering if Dick Cheney is actually a bloodthirsty maniac who hunts men for sport like those guys in Hostel, the quiet drama of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina continues to unfold, further unraveling the myth that anyone in the Bush administration gave an airborne sh*t about the people drowning in their own living rooms in New Orleans.
Michael "Brownie" Brown recently told the Associated Press that despite becoming the poster-boy-fall-guy for Katrina, the federal response (which had all the effectiveness of a drunken frat boy trying to hot wire a space shuttle) was more than just his fault alone and more than Bush's fault for appointing a supreme dumbass like him in the first place.
Yet, in the furor over the government's ill-managed response, the primary lesson of Katrina has been buried by some really superb finger-pointing - a lesson that involves race in America.
In an interview with Brian Williams, G-Dubs said you can call him anything but don't call him a racist. That offends him. I'll take that to mean he's cool with me calling him an incompetent, war-mongering, homophobic, gastro-intestinal tumor on the colon of the world. But I'm also going to go ahead and call him a racist, as well.
It's cool, though. I'll freely admit that I'm a racist, too.
Actually, you holding this newspaper right now, you're also a racist.
To a degree, we're all a bunch of racists - white, black, brown, yellow, red or mauve. Engrained in all of us - as much as we don't want to admit it and as much as people don't want to talk about it - is fear. We all carry an inherent fear of the "other," of those who don't look like us, whose skin is different, whose eyes are different, whose features aren't what we saw from our cribs as infants. The difference between Bush and the rest of us is that most of us let that inherent fear dictate federal policy.
Put the pen down, holster your scathing e-mail and let me explain. In the last week while most of the media has been wondering if Dick Cheney is actually a bloodthirsty maniac who hunts men for sport like those guys in Hostel, the quiet drama of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina continues to unfold, further unraveling the myth that anyone in the Bush administration gave an airborne sh*t about the people drowning in their own living rooms in New Orleans.
Michael "Brownie" Brown recently told the Associated Press that despite becoming the poster-boy-fall-guy for Katrina, the federal response (which had all the effectiveness of a drunken frat boy trying to hot wire a space shuttle) was more than just his fault alone and more than Bush's fault for appointing a supreme dumbass like him in the first place.
Yet, in the furor over the government's ill-managed response, the primary lesson of Katrina has been buried by some really superb finger-pointing - a lesson that involves race in America.
In an interview with Brian Williams, G-Dubs said you can call him anything but don't call him a racist. That offends him. I'll take that to mean he's cool with me calling him an incompetent, war-mongering, homophobic, gastro-intestinal tumor on the colon of the world. But I'm also going to go ahead and call him a racist, as well.
It's cool, though. I'll freely admit that I'm a racist, too.
Actually, you holding this newspaper right now, you're also a racist.
To a degree, we're all a bunch of racists - white, black, brown, yellow, red or mauve. Engrained in all of us - as much as we don't want to admit it and as much as people don't want to talk about it - is fear. We all carry an inherent fear of the "other," of those who don't look like us, whose skin is different, whose eyes are different, whose features aren't what we saw from our cribs as infants. The difference between Bush and the rest of us is that most of us let that inherent fear dictate federal policy.
