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Nouveau Racism

by C. Michael Kim

Thursday, September 29, 2005

I

n the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing disaster in New Orleans, much of America has had its eyes opened to the massive divide that exists within our societal ranks, but has been disregarded for quite some time. While a large portion of our country has been rightfully appalled, and reached out with empathy and support, there has also been an influx of the fringe racist crowd that is willing to ignore facts and evidence to assert their versions of the world, which are often based on baseless bias, ignorance, fear, and simple prejudice.

As a Korean who moved here at the age of six to a small town in CA filled to the brim with white people, and once listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the most churches per capita, I can tell you that racism - overt or subtle - exists vibrantly within this country. I think it is also important to note that white people, regardless of how kind and good-hearted they may be, cannot and will not ever be able to fathom the depths of the racism that colored people encounter everyday in this country. The best of them sympathize and do what they can to omit such an awful quality from their personalities, while the worst of them look the other way and pretend that it does not exist. As if this country truly provided a level playing field to all its citizens, regardless of skin color or class. The middle is made up of the outright racists, who have learned this behavior from their friends and families, never being educated on the fallacy of the illusions they base their empty hatreds on.

What I've learned over the past 20 years is that black people have it much worse than any other race. I don't pretend to know exactly why this is; although if I were to posit a theory, I'd base the roots of racism towards blacks in the slave trade that dominated America in its infancy, and the concept of the slave/master relationship that persisted throughout the early 20th century. Couple that with the fears of the strong black savage, fears that have been echoed in such texts as The Bell Curve, which attempted to set a scale based on intelligence/penis size/strength that was linearly established among the various races, which ironically may be a result of crude genetic engineering by slave owners -- in which the strongest slaves were mated to create stronger offspring for more intense work -- and you create the conditions in a still segregated country for a lot of empty prejudices and hatred.

None of this was more apparent in the hysteria that accompanied the coverage of Hurricane Katrina. I have no doubt that there were small groups of criminals who took advantage of a horrible situation by stealing, attacking, raping, killing, etc. And there exists visual evidence, as journalists have documented plenty of murders and assaults, to accompany the needless and countless deaths due to the hurricane and the resulting governmental failures. However, to suggest that everyone left behind was a savage, or brought this fate upon themselves by not working hard or succeeding the way a middle class white person would, is total bullshit and the result of absolute ignorance and prejudice. First, you discount the irrefutable fact that this situation should never have happened because the government should have not failed the people of the Gulf Coast. Second, you ignore the irrefutable fact that poverty exists in this country, and in the South, poverty is most prevalent among black people. Third, you must believe that if civil order broke down in an all-white city, there would be no looting or crime or violence, which just may be the dumbest idea ever imagined in the history of the universe.

I'm pretty sure i'm not violating any copyright laws here, as this following article was never published in print. Originally posted by Atrios at his own site, the following is an op-ed piece written by historian Rick Perlstein, which was rejected by every publication he sent it to, despite the fact that Mr. Perlstein is a regularly published contributor to many newspapers and magazines throughout the country.

A white friend who's volunteering in refugee shelters on the Gulf Coast tells me the kind of things he's hearing around the small city where he's working.

A pastor is obsessed that "local" women not be allowed near the shelters: "At a community meeting they said these were the last evacuees, the poorest of the poor"--the most criminal, being his implication, the most likely to rape.

My friend says: "There were rumors that there were basically gangs of blacks walking up and down the main drag in town harassing business owners." The current line is that "some of them weren't even evacuees, they were just fake evacuees trying to stir up trouble and riot, because we all know that's what they want to do."

He talked to local police, who report no problems: just lost, confused families, in desperate need of help.

Yet "one of the most ridiculous rumors that has gone around is that 'the Civic Center is nothing but inmates. It's where they put all the criminals.'"

I immediately got that uncanny feeling: where had I heard things like this before?

The answer is: in my historical research about racial tensions forty years ago. I'm writing a book against the backlash against liberalism and civil rights in the 1960s. One of the things I've studied is race riots. John Schmidhauser, a former congressman from rural Iowa, told me about the time, in the summer of 1966, he held a question and answer session with constituents. Violence had broken out in the Chicago ghetto, and one of the farmers asked his congressman about an insistent rumor:

"Are they going to come out here on motorcycles?"

It's a funny image, a farmer quaking at the vision of black looters invading the cornfields of Iowa. But it's also awfully serious. The key word here is "they." It's a fact of life: in times of social stress when solid information is scarce, rumors fill the vacuum. Rumors are evidence of panic. The rumors only fuel further panic. The result, especially when the rumors involved are racial, can be a deadly stew of paranoia.

In the chaotic riot in Detroit in 1967, National Guardsman hopped up on exaggerated rumors of cop killers would descend upon a block and shoot out the streetlights to hide themselves from snipers. Guardsmen on the next block would hear the shots and think they were under attack by snipers. They would shoot at anything that moved. That was how, in Detroit, dozens of innocent people were shot. In one case, a firefighter was the one who died.

And now, a similar paranoia has turned deadly in New Orleans too. The early report Sunday was that police shot at eight suspicious characters at the 17th Street Canal, killing five. On Monday the report was clarified: the victims were contractors on their way to work to fix the canal.

It's not that human beings haven't committed awful crimes amidst the toxic muck of New Orleans--just as they did in the urban riots of the 1960s. It's not as if the onslaught of poor, frightened, and alien-seeming evacuees aren't making life nerve-wracking in the many scattered towns where they are straggling in as refugees. With statistical certainly, they have.

But now New Orleans has filled with tens of thousands of Army, police, and National Guard soldiers. They are doing courageous, necessary work. But that are also operating in a cultural context rife with paranoia. Many of the people they are policing are armed as well--also possessed of a hair-trigger paranoia that might presume every shotgun-like crack, every snapped powerline, every detonated firecracker, is a sniper's shot aimed at them.

And now there is that New Orleans diaspora, poor black men ("fake evacuees"?) wandering around unfamiliar towns.

It is the job of all of us to help ratchet down the paranoia: not to let the rumors spread. So none of these people start firing on each other.

Paranoia is not the exclusive province of Iowa farmers forty years ago, or--urban snobs take note--Louisiana yokels in rural parishes now. In 1992, in New York City, during the Los Angeles riots, the word spread on certain street corners about rioters burning buildings and overturning cars just a few blocks away. All of it was fantasy.

But now, everyone with an email account can be implicated in the spreading of such fantasies--nationwide.

One of the most riveting early accounts of conditions in New Orleans was an email sent around by Dr. Greg Henderson. "We hear gunshots frequently," he wrote. It wasn't long before that got transformed, in the dissemination, into: doctors get shot at frequently. An Army Times article reported that desperate evacuees at the Superdome, terrified that losing their place in line might mean losing their life, "defecated where they stood." Now, it's easy, if you take a moment to think about it, to understand that happening to people, perhaps elderly and sick, under unendurable conditions of duress. As circulated on the Internet, however, another interpretation takes shape: these people are not like us. Them. Savages that, if they come to your town, might just be capable of anything. Even if they are just lost, confused people, in desperate need of help.

We can do better. We must do better.

I'm going to follow that up with excerpts from a Wall Street Journal op-ed written today by Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, and hero to millions of ignorant white racists everywhere. Because the article is hidden behind the Wall Street Journal's subscriber block, I can only quote certain parts of it. But trust me, even the fragments are disturbing in their ignorance. Other images show us the face of the hard problem: those of the looters and thugs, and those of inert women doing nothing to help themselves or their children. They are the underclass.

We in the better parts of town haven't had to deal with the underclass for many years, having successfully erected screens that keep them from troubling us. We no longer have to send our children to school with their children. Except in the most progressive cities, the homeless have been taken off the streets. And most importantly, we have dealt with crime. This has led to a curious paradox: falling crime and a growing underclass.

[...]

When Ronald Reagan took office, 0.9% of the population was under correctional supervision. That figure has continued to rise. When crime began to fall in 1992, it stood at 1.9%. In 2003 it was 2.4%. Crime has dropped, but criminality has continued to rise.

[...]

Criminality is the most extreme manifestation of the unsocialized young male. Another is the proportion of young males who choose not to work. Among black males ages 20-24, for example, the percentage who were not working or looking for work when the first numbers were gathered in 1954 was 9%. That figure grew during the 1960s and 1970s, stabilizing at around 20% during the 1980s. The proportion rose again, reaching 30% in 1999, a year when employers were frantically seeking workers for every level of job. The dropout rate among young white males is lower, but has been increasing faster than among blacks.

[...]

The government hasn't a clue. Versions of every program being proposed in the aftermath of Katrina have been tried before and evaluated. We already know that the programs are mismatched with the characteristics of the underclass. Job training? Unemployment in the underclass is not caused by lack of jobs or of job skills, but by the inability to get up every morning and go to work. A homesteading act? The lack of home ownership is not caused by the inability to save money from meager earnings, but because the concept of thrift is alien. You name it, we've tried it. It doesn't work with the underclass.

Murray's basic premise is that certain segments of the black population are not possessed of the same work ethic he projects on to white people. That the people who were left behind were there because they had been lazy their whole lives and depended on crime to get by. This passes for respectable work? This passes for acceptable in our culture? The Wall Street Journal can kiss my ass, and while they do that, they can count for me how many black people they've hired to work on Wall St. in the last twenty years. I'd like to see Charles Murray or any one of the assholes at the WSJ walk into a ghetto or a government endorsed housing project and try to survive. I'd like to see them born into a family with little money to offer, and see how well they do, if their "innate" work ethic would somehow help them maintain a high-paying bullshit job despite a shitty educational system that fails its students at every level, despite the abundance of governmental corruption that fails to help people at all levels. In fact, I'd like to see what they would have done as children if their parents had not had large fortunes to spend on them and the polished buffering of their ignorance. If Daddy's good friend from college didn't hire them for their first job, if a legacy in their family hadn't helped them get into the right college.

White people are easily the biggest beneficiaries of racism in this entire country, yet they are always the first ones to act horrified when someone receives some kind of benefit because of their skin color. Oh goodness, reverse racism! As if things are fair to begin with. This type of garbage is the biggest reason racism still exists: because political correctness has camouflaged the true ignorance that exists everywhere and fooled the majority of this country into believing that we have solved this problem, and allowed the true racists (I'm talking about you Barbara Bush) to mask their hatred into polite words and polite protestations. I think it's pretty fucking obvious that this problem still exists, and will continue to exist until people finally face the facts. These facts won't be supplied by people like Charles Murray. It can only be learned if people leave their whitewashed existences in the segregated communities throughout this country, until everyone makes an effort to understand the various realities and perspectives that exist because of racial divides, and put forth an honest and sincere effort to accentuate what we all share, and not the superficial qualities that set us apart.

-C. Michael Kim

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