A Point that Cannot be Repeated Enough

Pandagon itself is a pretty successful blog and Atrios picked this up so it will do better than this blog could ever push it. Nonetheless it should be repeated ad nauseum by those of us who decry racism...and mean it! New Orleans is all-in-all a poor town economically, take away the tourism. Well that's not there at present and will not be for a while. The reason so many people could not get out is because they could not afford the gas (and the way gas prices will go if there is another hurricane this year, that will be repeated with even more people). An overwhelming number of those people, judging by the video are African-American.

What I fear is that underlying racism is going to come into this, hell it already is even in the non-FoxNews media and Amanda summed this up quite well:

The victims of the flood will be portrayed via racist stereotypes as criminals and idiots. This will predispose the audience to disliking them. Then, after everything settles down, a few right wingers will start implying that the dead brought their own fate on themselves by being too stupid and/or criminal to evacuate. This focus will distract the pundits from discussing the real issue at hand, which is why the fuck we didn't have the resources on hand to evacuate a city that has Hurricane Target written all over it. Before you know it, it'll be a wingnut bonaza of people both gleefully indulging in the most racist tendencies while simultaneously claiming that the only reason one might end up dead in a hurricane is because one doesn't have "personal responsibility". But my guess is that the people who are dead mostly didn't have transportation out of the city. Watch the media bury the truth of what happened so fast it'll make your head spin.

And this dynamic was self-evident watching the poor and overwhelmingly black pushed into the Superdome for what will be days, if not weeks of misery. A disaster far less comfortable, far slower developing and ultimately far more staggering than 9/11 IMO.