A lecture

I've overheard conversations about how all the looters in New Orleans are black and read posts on the internet about how the people who are still stuck there are animals who don't deserve help.

It's hard enough to watch television right now. But this ignorance and lack of compassion is repulsive.

Some points I'd like to make:

-The population of New Orleans is around 70 percent black. Most of the people doing anything in New Orleans are black, whether we're talking looting or going to Sunday school.

-The people who are left behind are mostly poor people who had no way out. There are also a sizable minority of misguided individuals like my landlady and Jonathan and Miss S' neighbors, and some hapless tourists.

-These people have had no electricity, air-conditioning, running water or phone service for four days. And now they're running out of food. High temperatures have been in the mid-90s before heat index.

-No one would deny that New Orleans has a pitch-black dark side: it's a very, very poor city. It's a city with astonishingly bad public education, an unbelievable illiteracy rate and lots of very ignorant citizens. It's a city with an endemic crime problem which has recently recaptured the title of Murder Capital USA. It's a chaotic, disorganized city.

-There is certainly a lot of overlap between the poor, ignorant and criminal categories, but the three are far from being synonomous. Sadly, it's not really a surprise that the thuggish element is running wild when all restraining factors have disappeared.

-But most of the people left there are just regular, but now desperate, people. Read above about lack of power, phone, water, food, etc. Plus they have to defend themselves against the thugs--who, by the way, are in as hopeless a situation as everyone else.

What the fuck would you do in that situation? Are you sure you would behave better under that kind of pressure?

Listen fatass suburban closet racists, I have news for you. Even in America, not everyone has a car. Even among people who have a car, not everyone has 20 or 30 dollars to put in the gas tank, or a credit card to fill it up with or to buy a bus ticket or whatever. That's true even of law-abiding, job-having citizens. I'm a nice middle class white girl, and I still had to scramble to find a way out.

Also, sadly, many people didn't really realize that this kind of devastation was a real possibility for the city. I knew, as did most of my friends, but we are the kind of people who read newspapers and magazines and listen to NPR and maybe even talk to scientists and engineers. That sounds snotty, but it's not a crime to not read newspapers and a frightening number of New Orleans' residents couldn't if they wanted to. Or there are people like my neighbor who had heard all about it but doubted the danger was real, who thought it was all scare tactics by the media. So maybe there were foolish, but we've all been foolish and made mistakes.

Being poor or ill-informed does not make you less than human. I hate to see the kind of scared desperate bad behavior we've seen on television, but if that cancels out your compassion I have a question about exactly who is less than human.