I have felt obliged on more than a few occasions to condemn blacks (like Al Sharpton) for playing the “race card” while complaining about all manner of grievances. I suspect this is why so many people expressed shock when I led the chorus of those charging that race had everything to do with the salutary neglect the Bush Administration displayed in responding to Hurricane Katrina:
Whereas Katrina inflicted her wrath indiscriminately, relief for her victims seems to have been a matter of race… Many (white) people are dumfounded by the federal neglect that led to the horrific images of misery and chaos shown on TV. They are “shocked, shocked” that these scenes (with thirst and hunger compounded by rape and murder) are playing out in New Orleans, not in ‘some third world country’. But in the souls of black folk, we know that an America where such neglect did not exist … was never America to us…
So, here’s the truth laid bare for the world to see: if New Orleans were mostly white, these scenes would not exist!
(Katrina relief efforts marked by death, destruction, despair…, The iPINIONS Journal, September 2, 2005)
Many members of that Administration have since written memoirs, rationalizing all they said and did during their time in office. Yet none of them felt moved to confess the obvious, namely, that race was a factor in the slow delivery of relief to the predominantly black victims of Katrina.
Ironically, the person who gave them ostensible absolution in this respect was none other than former Secretary of State Colin Powell who insisted during an interview with Barbara Walters – right in the midst of this political storm – that:
I don’t think it’s racism, I think it’s economic.
(ABC 20/20, September 8, 2005)
This of course is the political version of that dispassionate canard, it’s not personal, it’s just business. Which means that far from absolving the Bush Administration, Powell merely exposed its practical indifference to the suffering of poor people – most of whom in this case just happened to be black. (An indifference, incidentally, that was also on display when this Administration rushed in to save folks on Wall Street while letting those on Main Street suffer when the financial crisis hit in 2008.)
This is why I am so pleased to see that at least one of them has decided to confess. Because in her soon-to-be-published memoir No Higher Honor, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice comes clean in rather dramatic fashion:
The airwaves were filled with devastating pictures from New Orleans. And the faces of most of the people in distress were black. I knew right away that I should never have left Washington. I called my chief of staff, Brian Gunderson. ‘I’m coming home,’ I said.
‘Yeah. You’d better do that,’ he answered.
Then I called the President. ‘Mr. President, I’m coming back. I don’t know how much I can do, but we clearly have a race problem,’ I said…
I wasn’t just the secretary of state with responsibility for foreign affairs; I was the highest-ranking black in the administration and a key advisor to the President. What had I been thinking?
(Excerpted in The Huffington Post, October 24, 2011)
No shit!
I appreciate Condi finally providing this insider’s account to help set the record straight for posterity. It will be interesting to see though if she backslides when pressed on her book tour to explain the contemporaneous consciousness of guilt her confession reveals.
In any case, I just wish she had the balls to speak up back then to counter the attempt by Powell and others to whitewash the role race played in the way the Bush Administration responded to Hurricane Katrina.
NOTE: I’m not sure what to make of recent revelations that Gaddafi and every other Arab dictator, king and prince across Africa and the Middle East were all absolutely smitten with Condi: go figure….
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Katrina relief efforts…