“We Always Worried This Would Happen”: One Year Ago Today
by digby
“What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this–this [chuckles slightly] is working very well for them.” Barbara Bush, September 4, 2005
One year ago today, most of New Orleans had finally been evacuated. But the reality of what had happened during those few days was still sinking in. The far right web sites were full of stories of everything from child rape to necrophilia.
Here’s the Council of Conservative Citizen’s web site:
Updates! Eyewitness accounts report that at least six people have been murdered inside the superdome. One dozen or more have been raped. Most of the rape victims are very young. A seven year old girl, an eight year old boy, and numerous teenage girls. The US media is extremely reluctant to report any of this because of political correctness!
The mainstream press was starting to report things like this:
BATON ROUGE, La. — They locked down the entrance doors Thursday at the Baton Rouge hotel where I’m staying alongside hundreds of New Orleans residents driven from their homes by Hurricane Katrina.
“Because of the riots,” the hotel managers explained. Armed Gunmen from New Orleans were headed this way, they had heard.
“It’s the blacks,” whispered one white woman in the elevator. “We always worried this would happen.”
We heard about people “shitting where they stood” and found out that large number of evacuees had been denied the ability to try to walk out of New Orleans after days went by and they became increasingly desperate. One year ago tonight, Ray Nagin went on Nightline and said this:
JOHN DONOVAN, ABC NEWS: The last thing I want to ask you about is the race question.
So, I’m out at the highway — it was last Thursday — huge number of people stuck in the middle of nowhere. Jesse Jackson comes in, looks at the scene, and says it looks like the scene of a, from a slave ship. And I said, “Reverand Jackson,, the imagery suggests you’re saying this is about race.” And he didn’t answer directly, he said, “Take a look at it, what do you think it’s about?”
What’s your response to that?
RAY NAGIN, MAYOR OF NEW ORLEANS: (Sighs) You know, I haven’t really thought much about the race issue. I will tell you this. I think it’s, it could be, but it’s a class issue for sure. Because I don’t think this type of response would have happened if this was Orange County, California. This response definitely wouldn’t have happened if it was Manhattan, New York. And I don’t know if it’s color or class.
DONOVAN: In some way, you think that New Orleans got second-class treatment.
NAGIN: I can’t explain the response. And here’s what else I can’t explain: We are basically, almost surrounded by water. To the east, the bridge is out, you can’t escape. Going west, you can’t escape because the bridge is under water. We found one evacuation route, to walk across the Crescent City Connection, on the overpass, down Highway 90 to 310 to I10, to go get relief.
People got restless and there was overcrowding at the convention center. They asked us, “Is there any other option?” We said, “Well, if you want to walk, across the Crescent City Connection, there’s buses coming, you may be able to find some relief.” They started marching. At the parish line, the county line of Gretna, they were met with attack dogs and police officers with machine guns saying “You have to turn back…”
DONOVAN: Go back.
NAGIN: “…because a looter got in a shopping center and set it afire and we want to protect the property in this area.”
DONOVAN: And what does that say to you?
NAGIN: That says that’s a bunch of bull. That says that people value their property, and were protecting property, over human life.
And look, I was not suggesting, or suggesting to the people that they walk down into those neighborhoods. All I wanted them to do and I suggested: walk on the Interstate. And we called FEMA and we said “Drop them water and supplies as they march.” They weren’t gonna go into those doggone neighborhoods. They weren’t going to impact those neighborhoods. Those people were looking to escape, and they cut off the last available exit route out of New Orleans.
DONOVAN: And was that race? Was that class?
NAGIN: I don’t know. You’re going to have to go ask them. But those questions need to be answered. And I’m pissed about it. And I don’t know how many people died as a result of that.
We later got a very vivid first hand report of that night from two paramedics who had been in New Orleans for a convention and couldn’t evacuate. I first read about it on Making Light:
We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched past the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news. Families immediately grabbed their few belongings and quickly our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.
[…]
As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander’s assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.
We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the six-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their city. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.
A lot of people said this story could not be believed because it was written by two socialists from San Francisco. The account was later verified by numerous others, including the police chief of Gretna, who said:
Lawson said that once the storm itself had passed Monday, police from Gretna City, Jefferson Parrish and the Louisiana State Crescent City Connection Police Department closed to foot traffic the three access points to the bridge closest to the West Bank of the river.
[…]
“If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged.”
Part of the reason for this was that from the beginning the primary concern for many was protecting property, not saving people. As I mentioned last week, the morning he got back to Washington, having had to cut his precious vacation short two days, the president on the United States went on television:
He also warned Gulf Coast residents, including those searching for water and food, not to break into businesses or commit other crimes during the crisis.
“There ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this,” Bush said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“If people need water and food, we’re going to do everything we can to get them water and food,” Bush added. “It’s very important for the citizens in all affected areas to take personal responsibility and assume a kind of a civic sense of responsibility so that the situation doesn’t get out of hand, so people don’t exploit the vulnerable.”
At the same time:
The Homeland Security Department has requested and continues to request that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans,” said Renita Hosler, spokeswoman for the Red Cross.
“Right now access is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities. We have been at the table every single day [asking for access]. We cannot get into New Orleans against their orders.”
Though frustrated, Hosler understood the reasons. The goal is to move people out of an uninhabitable city, and relief operations might keep them there. Security is so bad that she fears feeding stations might get ransacked.
That fear came from the other reports of the crisis, reports like the one that had the rightwing frothing in a complete frenzy over events at different bridge — the alleged “gun battle” at the Danziger Bridge. Guess what:
Even in the desperate days after Hurricane Katrina, the news flash seemed particularly sensational: Police had caught eight snipers on a bridge shooting at relief contractors. In the gun battle that followed, officers shot to death five or six of the marauders.
Exhausted and emotionally drained police cheered the news that their comrades had stopped the snipers and suffered no losses, said an account in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. One officer said the incident showed the department’s resolve to take back the streets.
But nearly three months later — and after repeated revisions of the official account of the incident and a lowering of the death toll to two — authorities said they were still trying to reconstruct what happened Sept. 4 on the Danziger Bridge. And on the city’s east side, where the shootings occurred, two families that suffered casualties are preparing to come forward with stories radically different from those told by police.
A teenager critically wounded that day, speaking about the incident for the first time, said in an interview that police shot him for no reason, delivering a final bullet at point-blank range with what he thought was an assault rifle. Members of another family said one of those killed was mentally disabled, a childlike innocent who made a rare foray from home in a desperate effort to find relief from the flood.
The two families — one from New Orleans East and solidly middle class, the other poorer and rooted in the Lower 9th Ward — have offered only preliminary information about what they say happened that day. Large gaps remain in the police and civilian accounts of the incident.
News of the Danziger Bridge shootings roared across cable television for a time. But as with many overblown reports of crime and violence immediately after the hurricane, the facts remain elusive.
More recent reports show that at least one of the alleged “thugs” was an unarmed mentally challenged man who was shot in the back five times.
But it was earlier stories of similar lawlessness that led George W. Bush and others to order this — and make the rescue workers wait until it was in place before they could go in to provide food and water:
Troops begin combat operations in New Orleans
NEW ORLEANS — Combat operations are underway on the streets “to take this city back” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
“This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome. “We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”
Jones said the military first needs to establish security throughout the city. Military and police officials have said there are several large areas of the city are in a full state of anarchy
Completely untrue.
Then there were the tales of depravity at the Superdome and the Convention Center which were reported as fact by the media:
Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss cited telephone breakdowns as a primary cause of reporting errors, but said the fact that most evacuees were poor African Americans also played a part.
“If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle class white people,” Amoss said, “it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering.”
Some of the hesitation that journalists might have had about using the more sordid reports from the evacuation centers probably fell away when New Orleans’ top officials seemed to confirm the accounts.
Nagin and Police Chief Eddie Compass appeared on “Oprah” a few days after trouble at the Superdome had peaked.
Compass told of “the little babies getting raped” at the Superdome. And Nagin made his claim about hooligans raping and killing.
State officials this week said their counts of the dead at the city’s two largest evacuation points fell far short of early rumors and news reports. Ten bodies were recovered from the Superdome and four from the Convention Center, said Bob Johannessen, spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.
(National Guard officials put the body count at the Superdome at six, saying the other four bodies came from the area around the stadium.)
Of the 841 [now more than twice that number] recorded hurricane-related deaths in Louisiana, four are identified as gunshot victims, Johannessen said. One victim was found in the Superdome but was believed to have been brought there, and one was found at the Convention Center, he added.
I wrote a lot about a particular form of racism — fear of the black mob — in the weeks after Katrina. I’m sure there will be many academic tomes written devoted to sorting out how this unfolded and why. But there is no doubt that it happened: we watched it in real time as the law ‘n order right reflexively called for looters to be shot on sight in the opening moments of the crisis; as the president issued stern warnings that victims were not to break into businesses for food and water (even as the red cross was told not to bring in food and water because it was unsafe); as the press reported blacks as “looting” and whites as “finding,” and as ever more bizarre rumors of violence and depravity were reported as fact.
Over and over again the fearful lizard brain of the racist mind was inundated with pictures of black people in large numbers in one place and instead of being able to interpret what they were actually seeing — mostly desperate women, children and elderly people who had been cast into a living nightmare — they were afraid. And being afraid, they delayed and dithered and then overreacted until on the final night, as thousands and thousands of people were trapped, thirsty and hungry, living in unimaginable filth having waited minute by minute for a rescue that never came, some of them took matters into their own hands and tried to walk out of that nightmare. They were stopped by men with guns on a bridge.
People will argue that this was an issue of poverty and class, and it surely was. But the assumptions that were made by officials and the press and many people around the nation were knee jerk reactions to African American crime — assumptions that have been successfully exploited by the rightwing for many moons and which never fail to rise up in a situation like this.
Some people tried to raise the consciousness of the media about this at the time. Rick Perlstein wrote an excellent op-ed piece on the subject that was turned down by all the major newspapers. They didn’t want to hear it.
The failures of Katrina cannot be attributed solely to racism, of course. There are many, many reasons for it. But when you look back from the distance of one year on, I think it’s clearer than ever that an irrational, primitive fear of unruly, criminal African Americans contributed hugely to the way that the evacuation was handled — and that some officials like Nagin and Compass contributed by spreading the rumors of violence and giving it official credibility, probably because they thought that it would spur the response rather than delay it.
Deep down, for a lot of people, it’s quite simple:
“It’s the blacks. We always worried this would happen.”
.
