Everything That Came After Was Because of Race

Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race.

— Condi Rice, denying charges that the NOLA rescue efforts were so incomprehensibly appalling because of the race of the vast majority of victims

So, here’s the thing: I think she’s right. In that very carefully worded statement about leaving people unattended, I’m sure Condi is right. There is simply no doubt that the primary reason so many people are dead and so many people’s suffering was made infinitely worse as they languished for days in unsanitary and frightening conditions is because of incompetence. And there’s no doubt that even if New Orleans was populated exclusively with rich old white wheelchair-bound conservative fucks who collectively gave millions to Bush’s campaign, a whole hell of a lot of them would be dead now, too, specifically because of that incompetence.

But I believe both the extremity of and, most importantly, the official response to the incompetence have everything to do with the skin color of the victims.

There’s simply no way that if the strewn corpses (so many dead bodies, of Americans on American soil—oh my god) I see in news photos were white, that if the babies clasped in their mothers arms had heads of blonde curls and big blue eyes, that the concerted effort to get them out would not have been coordinated sooner. Imagine Lambeau Field turned into a lawless hellhole, filled with white Wisconsinites living in their own excrement and dying for want of a drink of water, with women and children being raped and murdered, and tell me that heaven and earth wouldn’t have been moved to get them the fuck out of there ASAP. And above all, tell me the president would have congratulated the man whose incompetence left them there for a job well done.

I think not.

If a white teenager had grabbed a school bus and delivered nearly 100 people to safety, would he be facing possible criminal charges, or would President Bush already have flown out to pin a medal on him for another tasty photo op?

If it had been mainly desperate white people rummaging through grocery stores for sustenance and diapers for their kids, would the president have taken the time to declare a zero tolerance policy for looting? What about issuing a shoot to kill order?

If this had happened in a place where most of the faces looked more like his own, might Bush have come back from his vacation perhaps a bit sooner? Might there be a little less congratulatory back-slapping about how well everything’s been handled, if it were white bodies starting to pile up?

Isn’t is likely that the administration probably wouldn’t be blaming the victims for not evacuating (conveniently ignoring the fact that most of them couldn’t) if the victims weren’t black? What makes me angriest about that detestable talking point is that it reeks of a cleaned-up version of what’s being said in the back offices, away from the cameras—Why didn’t those fucking niggers get out when they were told to? They’re making us look bad. It’s not a tactic designed not of concern, but of consternation.

Sure, thanks to Bush’s vile ideology and insistence on appointing political hacks to jobs for which they are demonstrably unqualified was the main reason the victims of Katrina were “left unattended,” as Condi so delicately phrased it, and people of any color would have suffered a dire fate at the resulting incompetence, although others would probably not have been left to languish for so long while the administration pissed around. And everything that came after, everything that made it so very, very much worse, was because of race.