There’s a lot of talk about how the slow response to Hurricane Katrina’s effects might be evidence of racial bias. I just spewed this in a comemnt on Jason Levine’s commentspace, and I’ll replicate it here, because I did some looking into this and hope that I have a point:
Disappointing. Disheartening.
I’d argue that the race thing seems overplayed because the media is—rightly!—focusing on New Orleans, where the large majority of folks unable to evacuate were black. The Mississippi Gulf Coast is pretty white, though: Hancock County, home to Bay St. Louis, some of the worst devastation, and most of my Coastie family, is 90% white; Harrison County, home to Biloxi and Gulfport and a lot of the early coverage on CNN, is 74% white; Jackson County, home to Pascagoula and Trent Lott, is 76% white. Compare this to Mississippi’s overall demographics, where just 60% of the state is white.
[I knew this instinctually, but I used to live in Scott County, which is just 57% white. If you're white in Mississippi but not from there [my family's from there, but I was 12 when we moved from Ohio], you notice these things.]
Compare this to the demographics of New Orleans, and you’ll see why extensive coverage of the events there easily make this appear to be a racial issue—whether it is in truth or not.
[I personally think that the slow response is more of a class issue than a race issue, and that it also speaks to the fact that both states are unimportant politically, the recent Louisiana Senatorial elections notwithstanding. But that's just my small electoral college standing biases showing.]
I’m not saying that I’m right here … I just want people to stop and think about it, to look at the numbers, and to realize that there’s a lot of selection bias here.
That said: being a white kid who grew up in Mississippi, I am full well of this fact—it’s never so much the fact of racism, but the impression that it exists or could exist. When you think that it could be this way, you rub salt in the open wound that still exists in this country, even if no one ever wants to address it.
It seems that Barack Obama agrees with you about the class issue:
http://www.suntimes.com/output/sweet/cst-nws-sweet05.html
I want this man to be my president…
Well, he makes it be about class, and then he doesn’t. I think that the nuance is designed to make it seem like he’s not selling out his base, which is crappy in my mind … because if he’s really seeing it as a class issue—which I think in some ways that it is—he needs to just leave it at that.
It frustrates me that New Orleans has almost fully suffocated the coverage—to the point that the poor response in other areas of Louisiana, much less Mississippi, goes unnoticed. I know that the bulk of the personal toll is going to be taken on the largest city in the area, but this storm fairly flattened the outer parishes, too.
There’s a lot to answer for at all levels of government, and while I’m largely a states’ rights defender, I think that the state governments have, over the last few years of hurricane action and reaction, proven themselves largely incapable of forward thinking about how to evacuate and react, which means that the Federal government will have to increase its involvement. However, that’s another rant altogether.
I’m curious to see what Mr. Obama will actually introduce on this score. All these nice speeches are one thing, but legisltion’s an entirely separate matter. [And yes, that's the crotchety old SGA bastard in me.]