Remembering Katrina

September 4, 2005 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.”

When the New Orleans levees broke in those awful early days after Hurricane Katrina, the country was riveted to its TV’s watching a slow moving disaster unfold before our eyes. As the flood waters rose and we started to see people walking waist deep through fetid water and scramble to their rooftops in hope of rescue a narrative began to take shape that would seriously affect the response: the city was under seige, wild gangs were terrorizing people in their homes and the police had completely abandoned their posts.

It started with looting,the most prosaic and common crime in any natural disaster, sometimes perpetrated out of opportunism and often out of necessity. It was immediately characterized in the press as criminal and dangerous. At least where some people were concerned.

Snopes.com captured this famous photographic juxtaposition of Katrina victims on Tuesday August 30th. In the first, the African American is characterized as walking through water after having “looted a grocery store” while in the other, the white victims were said to have “found” bread and water. It was the beginning of several days of ever rising hysteria, particularly on the right, about “looters,” which would cause the authorities to make some terrible decisions.

Perhaps most memorable example of the right wing frenzy was a column by Peggy Noonan in which she stated quite blandly:

As for the tragic piggism that is taking place on the streets of New Orleans, it is not unbelievable but it is unforgivable, and I hope the looters are shot. A hurricane cannot rob a great city of its spirit, but a vicious citizenry can.

 The blog Is That Legal quoted AEI fellow Ted Frank writing this:

I think shooting looters is a compassionate way to protect the safety and well-being of law-abiding citizens. Time after time it has been shown that the way to prevent deadly anarchic riots is to take firm decisive action to prevent matters from getting to a tipping point.

It’s important to remember that at this time the “piggish” footage everyone saw featured slow, calm scenes of people inside Big Box stores and Footlockers taking goods, often in the presence of police, and then wading through water holding the bags above their heads. It wasn’t anything like the frenzied scenes of Baghdad after the invasion, (when the right was far less agitated at the sight of massive, unrestrained looting under the noses of the US military. If I recall correctly, they characterized it as “stuff happens.”)

There were rampant rumors of violence, but no pictures of it despite the fact that photographers and film crews were all over the city. Still, the idea took hold and reports of running street battles and armed gangs were rampant.

On August 31st, the world woke up to see a sight that nobody ever expected to see in the United States — hundreds of Americans abandoned at the New Orleans convention center with no water, no food, begging the only person they recognized, entertainer Harry Connick Jr, (who had made his way down there on his own) to please help them. Hour after hour we watched the shocking scenes of mostly elderly and mothers with young children — the most vulnerable residents of the city who hadn’t been able to evacuate abandoned. The sun was shining. The camera crews were everywhere. There were pictures of national guard trucks driving by little old ladies in wheelchairs as people screamed for help. All over the country, people wondered,’where is the government, where is the Red Cross?”

We found out a few days later that the Red Cross was told not to go into the city by the authorities (which ones remains under dispute) because it was too unsafe. The government wanted to quell the violence first — violence we continued to hear a lot about, but never actually saw. Rumors of gang rapes and shoot outs and even necrophilia in the convention center and the Superdome continued to be reported all day in the media as we watched the dehydrated elderly and crying babies waiting for rescue.

“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.

 Here was a typical right wing blog post during this period:

Security has become a major concern now, because the NOPD is ineffective and the looters terrorists are roaming the streets. Word is now that they’re lighting buildings on fire, but I can’t confirm that. Anyway, we have to run guard shifts and patrol and it limits our downtime. 

It is a zoo out there though, make no mistake. It’s the wild kingdom. It’s Lord of the Flies. That doesn’t mean there’s murder on every street corner. But what it does mean is that the rule of law has collapsed, that there is no order, and that property rights cannot and are not being enforced. Anyone who is on the streets is in immediate danger of being robbed and killed. It’s that bad.

There were two incidents on bridges that perfectly captured this racist paranoia. (Bridges certainly seem to have a special place in American racial iconography, don’t they?) The first was a shooting at the Danziger bridge on September 4th, which was widely reported as a sniper attack on contractors trying to fix the bridge. Blogger Michele Malkin commented:

It’s outrageous that there are idiots shooting at contractors trying to repair structural damage in New Orleans. Thank God the police are fighting back.

(As it turned out, the police were indicted on murder charges. According to the prosecutors, the men they shot were unarmed and innocent.)

On a different night, at a different bridge, another side of the same story unfolded. Abandoned at the convention center, without water, fed up with promises of imminent rescue, some of the residents decided to try leave the city on foot. They were stopped by men with guns:

The officers fired warning shots into the air and then leveled their weapons at members of the crowd, Bradshaw said. He approached, hands in the air, displaying his paramedic’s badge.

“They told us that there would be no Superdomes in their city,” the couple wrote. “These were code words that if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River — and you weren’t getting out of New Orleans.”

And when exhausted hurricane victims set up temporary shelters on the highway, Gretna police came back a few hours later, fired shots into the air again, told people to “get the f — off the bridge” and used a helicopter to blow down all the makeshift shelters, the paramedics said.

When the officers had pushed the crowd back far enough, one of them took the group’s food and water, dropped it in the trunk of a patrol car and drove away

.

The Gretna police chief told the UPI:

“If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged.”

The LA Times went back and looked at some of the stories and dryly noted:

Journalists and officials who have reviewed the Katrina disaster blamed the inaccurate reporting in large measure on the breakdown of telephone service, which prevented dissemination of accurate reports to those most in need of the information. Race may have also played a factor.

May have?

It was obvious that much of the delay in the rescue at the convention center and elsewhere was a direct result of the racist paranoia that made Peggy Noonan immediately call for shooting tennis shoe looters on sight and for the head of the National Guard to make comparisons between New Orleans and Somalia. And yet, despite cameras being everywhere, for all the breathless reporting of murders and atrocities and gang rapes, there was never any evidence of these things at the time.

But then, this is an old story in American life. The Big Con’s own Rick Perlstein picked up the historical parallels right away and wrote an op-ed that was rejected by every paper he sent it to. Nobody wanted to hear that these rumors of wanton violence had been routine during the 60’s urban riots, and caused much of the overreactions that led to the deaths of innocent people.

He ended up publishing it in the blogosphere, on Eschaton:

A white friend who’s volunteering in refugee shelters on the Gulf Coast tells me the kind of things he’s hearing around the small city where he’s working.

A pastor is obsessed that “local” women not be allowed near the shelters: “At a community meeting they said these were the last evacuees, the poorest of the poor”–the most criminal, being his implication, the most likely to rape.

My friend says: “There were rumors that there were basically gangs of blacks walking up and down the main drag in town harassing business owners.” The current line is that “some of them weren’t even evacuees, they were just fake evacuees trying to stir up trouble and riot, because we all know that’s what they want to do.”

He talked to local police, who report no problems: just lost, confused families, in desperate need of help.

Yet “one of the most ridiculous rumors that has gone around is that ‘the Civic Center is nothing but inmates. It’s where they put all the criminals.'”

I immediately got that uncanny feeling: where had I heard things like this before?

The answer is: in my historical research about racial tensions forty years ago. I’m writing a book against the backlash against liberalism and civil rights in the 1960s. One of the things I’ve studied is race riots. John Schmidhauser, a former congressman from rural Iowa, told me about the time, in the summer of 1966, he held a question and answer session with constituents. Violence had broken out in the Chicago ghetto, and one of the farmers asked his congressman about an insistent rumor:

“Are they going to come out here on motorcycles?”

It’s a funny image, a farmer quaking at the vision of black looters invading the cornfields of Iowa. But it’s also awfully serious. The key word here is “they.” It’s a fact of life: in times of social stress when solid information is scarce, rumors fill the vacuum. Rumors are evidence of panic. The rumors only fuel further panic. The result, especially when the rumors involved are racial, can be a deadly stew of paranoia.

In the chaotic riot in Detroit in 1967, National Guardsman hopped up on exaggerated rumors of cop killers would descend upon a block and shoot out the streetlights to hide themselves from snipers. Guardsmen on the next block would hear the shots and think they were under attack by snipers. They would shoot at anything that moved. That was how, in Detroit, dozens of innocent people were shot. In one case, a firefighter was the one who died.

[…]

One of the most riveting early accounts of conditions in New Orleans was an email sent around by Dr. Greg Henderson. “We hear gunshots frequently,” he wrote. It wasn’t long before that got transformed, in the dissemination, into: doctors get shot at frequently. An Army Times article reported that desperate evacuees at the Superdome, terrified that losing their place in line might mean losing their life, “defecated where they stood.” Now, it’s easy, if you take a moment to think about it, to understand that happening to people, perhaps elderly and sick, under unendurable conditions of duress. As circulated on the Internet, however, another interpretation takes shape: these people are not like us. Them. Savages that, if they come to your town, might just be capable of anything. Even if they are just lost, confused people, in desperate need of help.

We can do better. We must do better.

(Read the whole thing, here.)

Similarly, I was reminded that going back to the beginning of our nation, there was a wide-spread fear of slave revolts that led to a sort of primal reaction among those of racist bent to too many blacks in one place without adequate police presence. This is a knee jerk reaction among certain people, a reflex of the racist American id. It’s not purely a white against black thing. After all, from the slave revolts to the urban riots, there were always African Americans who raised the alarms themselves. Chaos and anarchy are scary things and people don’t always trust one another in a crisis. But the fact remains that whenever a crisis occurs in the African American communities, many of the authorities who know better (and would be far more prudent if a different community were involved) are too willing to believe wild, unbelievable rumors they would never believe of others — and they overreact.

The instructions to the Red Cross to stay away because of the violence, the cops gunning down innocent people on the rumor of snipers, the police chief of a white suburb keeping stranded, desperate citizens from crossing into his territory at the point of a gun are all symptoms of racist paranoia. Indeed, that paranoia seemed to even become more acute as the pictures of dying old people and crying children dominated the TV screens, even though it was obvious that we were witnessing a desperate situation — that wasn’t violent. As Perlstein wrote, it was the impulse to see these people as “not like us.”

It’s true that the government dithered and was unprepared. Bush’s crony Brownie would have probably done a terrible job no matter which city disaster had struck. It may also be true that they were uncaring due to who was involved and their lack of political clout among those who were making decisions. But there is no doubt that one of the reasons for the delayed response was this long standing primal fear of a violent, angry black mob —- that didn’t actually exist.

I wonder if anyone’s taken the time to think about the implications of that or if we will just lurch to the next crisis in urban black America and let loose the hounds of racist paranoia once again.

The article I linked at the beginning of this post concludes:

By Thursday, local TV and radio stations in Baton Rouge—the only ones in the metro area still able to broadcast—were breezily passing along reports of cars being hijacked at gunpoint by New Orleans refugees, riots breaking out in the shelters set up in Baton Rouge to house the displaced, and guns and knives being seized.

Scarcely any of it was true—the police, for example, confiscated a single knife from a refugee in one Baton Rouge shelter. There were no riots in Baton Rouge. There were no armed hordes.

But all of it played directly into the darkest prejudices long held against the hundreds of thousands of impoverished blacks who live “down there,” in New Orleans, that other world regarded by many white suburbanites—indeed, many people across the rest of the state—as a dangerous urban no-go area.

Now the floods were pushing tens of thousands of those inner-city residents deep into Baton Rouge and beyond. The TV pictures showed vast throngs of black people who had been trapped in downtown New Orleans disgorging out of rescue trucks and helicopters to be ushered onto buses headed west on Interstate Highway 10. The nervousness among many of the white evacuees in my hotel was palpable.