I am revisiting this comment by Barbara Bush, as was reported in the
New York Times on September 7.
Before you bash me over the head about duplicating a diary, I just want you to know that this diary is not so much about what she said, but about the evolving response and acceptance of her racist statement.
In the last two days, I've had the opportunity to hear a local cop, a grocery store clerk, and various television and print pundits echo variations of Barbara Bush's racist and classist statement.
For any of you who may have missed it, here it is:
"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas," Barbara Bush said in an interview on Monday with the radio program "Marketplace." "Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality."
"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway," she said, "so this is working very well for them."
The racism of this attitude was underscored for me today by the reaction the clerk in my local optician's shop, a young black man, had to the feeble efforts of the federal government and FEMA to the disaster visited upon the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina.
This young man in Connecticut told me that he believes
the Bush Administration thinks that the people caught in Hurricane Katrina's path deserved what they got because they were black folks.
Last night I was in a local haunt, a small grocery store down by Compo Beach, off Long Island Sound, in Westport, CT. Westport is a wealthy, white community halfway between New York City and New Haven on I95. We pride ourselves here on Westport's history as a home to many artists. Voter registration here has the largest number of voters being unaffiliated, with Democrats registered in the second largest number of voters. Our town government is largely Democratic and the community went to John Kerry in the last presidential election.
There was a local cop in front of me, chatting first with the people behind the cash register and then with me, as I inserted myself into their conversation. This police officer, clearly a nice man and a seasoned cop, talked about the terrible ordeal the Louisiana police were dealing with. He talked about how corrupt the LA police department was known to be, and how about the problems visiting New Orleans now were the fault of the mayor and the governor of the state. He also said that the housing projects wiped out by the hurricane would not be rebuilt and that this was a good thing. That what we'd see is new, expensive homes going up along that coast line, and that the people in those housing projects were permanently displaced.
Then he talked about the responsibility the residents caught in the SuperDome carried regarding their situation. What he said was that he saw
young, able-bodied men lying on cots, waiting to be saved.
This comment reflected, to me, a sort of willing disregard that the people shown on TV were people without homes or belongings, trapped in a miserable environment without food or water or a way out.
What that comment reflected to me was a wish to believe that the people of New Orleans deserved what they got because they were black and poor.
Barbara Bush did not create this attitude, she was merely megaphoning a narrative that is implicitly racist, classist, hateful, and, by its exclusionary nature, unAmerican.
I have no doubt that she and the others who are breeding the belief that New Orleans deserved what it got feel themselves to be fine Christians, good citizens, and caring individuals.
In fact, to be sure, they feel they are proud, self-reliant, productive Americans. They speak proudly of their values and morals.
But they are, in fact, simply proud of their racism and not the true values and morals that make a good American or a fine human being.