I have had a great deal on my plate and this is not what I should be doing, but I had to write about this.
First there is this wonderful feel good story in September after the hurricane about a local community building housing for about 50 displaced people from Mississippi. Unfortunately it turned.
Here's the
lede:
After an emotional public hearing last night in this Henry County rural community, the welcome mat was pulled from a temporary housing project for hurricane evacuees.
Indeed it was. The pastor calls it prejudice. And pointed out a number of things:
Mr. Barnett said that the media has portrayed the hurricane victims as "angry blacks" who have a welfare mentality, and who have been in the welfare system for a long time. "It does not take a rocket scientist to look around and see that there are no black people among us," he said, adding that "there is a lot of racial prejudice in northwest Ohio, in this area."
He further said that blacks are not here "because they are not welcomed here."
(snip) Mrs. Ripke said she and others are not prejudiced and are offended by his comments, but residents are parents who are worried about the safety of their children.
The main goal, she said, is to protect the children and she questioned how the church would keep the community safe if the evacuees came, noting that the community lacks a local police department.
Yes, the fear has seived up past the goodwill of humanity and has once again turned Americans away from assisting other Americans. It's a sad day for Ohio. It's a sad day for all of us.
I'm still amazed by the crowd that says race wasn't involved or is not an issue with the hurricane and the subsequent refugees. Consider:
By 3-1, African-Americans believe that federal aid took so long to arrive in New Orleans in part because the city was poor and black.
By an equally large margin, whites disagree.
Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 71% of blacks say the disaster shows racial inequality remains a major problem in this country.
56% of whites said this was not an important lesson from the disaster.
Shorter whites: "problem? what problem?" shorter blacks: "of course whitey don't see any problems, cause he's white."
Dubois tackled this idea in "This Double Conciousness" back in the early 1900's. Specifically, if we currently look on the TV and see black Americans and not Americans, race is an issue.
And now the issue is, where are these people going to live? The white communities? Texas? Bush's ranch? I fear that the Ridgeville Circle communiy's response isn't that different from many around this country: No, not my neighborhood -- everyone knows "half" of the evacuees have rap sheets. It sucks to be them, but for god's sake, I moved out to the suburbs to be away from that "element".
We need to address or at the very least recognize that white's do have feelings/fears about the refugees and the refugees are equally concerned, but we can't do that because no one is talking about it.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that all this fear is out there. Shoot, Black Mob rule is still a fear that we just can't seem to shake as a society. Ever since it was so succinctly depicted in the film "Birth of a Nation" (which the President at the time said it was like writing history with a lightning bolt), the fear of hordes of lazy, criminal blacks invading our neighborhoods and driving down home values is a latent part of our white psyche. Digby has been all over this issue and has done some wonderful writing -- go check him out.
I am in Ohio and work at a state university. For 8 straight days after the hurricane, the student paper headlines gushed "hypnotist coming to campus" and highlighted in depth stories about the "cigarette tax". Their fisrt big story (after the day it hit) was over a week later and was in the opinion pages. The opinion pages! The worst natural disaster to ever hit the country and this university paper implicitly says that the most important story for students include a guy who fuckin' gets other 18 year olds to act like chickens on stage? It's disgusting.
And the university itself was just as bad. For days I emailed my boss, the faculty list proc., the faculty senate, the provost's office, begging for information on how we as a community were going to respond. I offered my help in planning or implementation, and the only response I got for 7 days (7 GD DAYS) was "we might have a table at our campus picnic, hold tight". WTF? I started a collection on my own. On the 8th day I received an email with some "plans" that had been developed. That was it. Nothing for me to do. Hold tight. Sit on your hands. The bureaucracy was alive and well and would handle things.
Then my 7 year old daughter, who was born in Baton Rouge, asked what she could do; we urged her to explore a way to help in her school (Catholic, by the way) or with friends. She found an old pretzel jar and had the idea of collecting donations at school. She included six dollars of her own. Their response? Thanks but no thanks. She was told her class couldn't collect money for the Katrina victims because it would be too hard for the teacher to count the funds and the school and church wants their people to react "in their own way". They told her "we'll write cards and letters to the victims". My daughterr, to her credit, said "they need food and water" and they told her, "oh no, they have food and water now."
Who can I hit over the head with newspaper headlines? How dare they lie to her? How dare they lie to her. And to add insult to injury, they handed her $6 donation back to her. She could only understand this as a rejection of her help.
So now I'm wondering where are the leaders who will be bold enough, strong enough to step into the fray and discuss race again in the States? Or I guess the question is how do we make them care and talk about it?
Or do I give in to the cynical monster of myself and realize that race relations is just one issue no one wants to talk about anymore?
(some of these ideas were posted on my blog).