i was standing today in a public building in nyc, watching cnn coverage when I heard it..."look at that fat bitch, she must be 300 pounds!"
i turned around to see three maybe 17 year old young white boys, hats turned backward, dressed in the typical hip-hop style of the day.
as a "typical nyc liberal," i generally try to check my reflexive chagrin to give an evaluative moment or two. but this hit me like a shot. as a photographer, i quickly flashed to the images of james nachtwey and others, shot at feeding centers in ethiopia, the sudan and other "typical" sites. the ones where one might find utterly starved black people crawling for food, their limbs little more than sticks, their bellies distended, flies biting at the corners of their eyes and mouths....you know the ones, where you see children on the laps of (usually white) volunteers, being fed gruel that we're assured costs less than a cup of coffee per day.
the woman in question was indeed overweight, unshowered, sweating, wading through knee high water, hungry, thirsty. a refugee. a refugee, here in the usa in the year 2005.
all the other factors are there....disaster, filth, sewage in the streets, violence, babies w/parents dead or missing, human disaster on an epic scale. why did this happen in the usa? was it racist? IS it racist? and why is the govt response so lax? is it because there are no starved blacks crawling?
threads on the usual rightwing boards, based on what ive read, seem to indicate that it is. threads on the usual leftwing boards harp on race as a factor again and again. an overwhelming percentage of the news footage features seemingly poor black people living in filth, trash, crying, begging for help.
and, strangely, the nytimes site is featuring an article on a woman named "lisa bourgeois", who wonders whether she should use the cheapest bottle of wine she could find for drinking or cooking, and of others who "have limited themselves to one cube for each glass of water. 'It's going to be a long haul,' she said. 'Everyone is sacrificing in lots of ways.'"
what is the role of race here? can americans have an actual discussion about the implications of race? was the nola mayor lax in not comandeering school buses (shown repeatedly on news channels) to transport poor people out of the area? was the nola plan truly to evacuate as many people as possible and abandon the poor to their fate?
more and more, this looks like the 50s and 60s, and bush and company are looking like the police cheif in birmingham, alabama. these are truly dark days.