“White People First…”

As Mamma D proclaimed in her Congressional Select Committee hearing, on Dec. 6^th, the ism’s of the world must come to an end. Racism bubbled to the surface from the sludge and filth of the bayou and the clean up will take more than sewage pumps and bulldozers. Stories of complete and unapologetic racism filled the committee room. Stories of hand picked whites and Asians from thousands of blacks to be evacuated out of New Orleans. Eye witness accounts of National Guard, local police and sheriff officers expounding racial slurs which would have made the late Gov. Wallace blush.

Stories of concentration camps along the I-10 causeway; people herded like cattle and left to fend for themselves. As Ishmael Muhammad, an attorney for the Advancement Project revealed that refuges in New Orleans were left to die. The specter of forlorn trepidation saturated the city. Locals felt that they were part of genocide. Leah Hodges, through tears, exclaimed that blacks were singled out for torture, mistreatment and abuse the likes of which were comparable to Nazi concentration camps. Rep. Miller (FL-R) – (I weep for Pensacola) - ‘respectfully asked’ that Mrs. Hodges not refer to the Causeway area as a concentration camp. She stated, in her rebuttal to Rep. Miller, that “if you put a pig in a dress it is still a pig.”

Rep. Miller was stubbornly firm and questioned the intelligence of Mrs. Hodges by asking rhetorically, “do you know the history behind concentration camps?’ Hodges, now full of fury at this notion, remarked that she is a lover of history and a college educated women, apparently Rep. Miller was caught off guard by this statement and this ended the banter. Rep. Miller clearly was looking to refute the accounts rather than listen to the brave men and women of New Orleans.

I found myself ashamed and distraught while listening to the over 3 hours of testimony. I kept thinking about how racism is pervasive and a cancerous pillar in American culture, infecting all parts of society. The governments (local, state, and federal) through their ineptitude and lack of leadership left these citizens to die. There is no excuse for the uselessness of our elected leaders. The downward spiral of incompetence and apathy towards people of lower socio-economic status and color has, once again, left a scar on America.

Ironically, we seem to ignore the plight of injustice that lurks in our own communities to seek out these same injustices throughout the world. Despite our best tendencies toward tolerance and open liberal thought (liberal thought brought about true social change in this country – see amendments 15,19,24,26 of the US constitutions), we have failed as a nation to recognize our own short falls. We have failed to fully grasp the abject injustice of our societal and cultural machinations.

Philosophically, as a white person, we can not understand this invisible injustice. In other words, white people understand that there must be an understanding between groups. We must try to understand these groups. Thus, this understanding illustrates the concept of divergence. This divergence is further reaching than aesthetic complexions. For if there were no need to understand then there would be no difference. You would be looking at a societal mirror. However, as our nation stands now, we are exponentially different and our capacity for understanding has diminished. A socio-economic and racial chasm is developing in our nation. Katrina was a geologic shift which produced the latest plumes of outrage. I foresee more ruptures within America.