During President Bush’s lengthy press conference Monday morning,
the topic of relief for Hurricane Katrina victims came up, and he
was asked by a reporter what he would be “giving to the nation on
the issue of race” in 2006. His reply was telling…and slightly
desperate: “One of the jobs of the president is to help people
reconcile and to move forward, united. One of the most hurtful
things I can hear is, you know, Bush doesn’t care about
African-Americans. First of all, it’s not true. And secondly, I am
— I believe that — you know, obviously I’ve got to do a better
job of communicating, I guess, to certain folks. Because my job is
to say to people, we’re all equally American, and the American
opportunity applies to you just as much as somebody else. And so I
will continue to do my best to reach out.”
Advice to the President: Don’t bother.
It’s futile to “reach out” to people who are slapping away your
hands, who are convinced that your administration, and you
yourself, are engaged in genocidal conspiracies against them, and
who have so far departed from standards of rational discourse that
they cannot be convinced otherwise.
Evidence that this is indeed the state of mind of many African
Americans, and specifically of victims of Hurricane Katrina, came
earlier this month at a special congressional hearing called by
Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.). It was perhaps the most ludicrous
performance by a panel of witnesses ever entered into the
Congressional Record; it made the finger-pointing blather
of the baseball steroid hearings seem like a Lincoln-Douglas
debate. Yet it passed with nary a word of public outrage. On the
contrary, the night of the spectacle, ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas
asserted with a straight face that the witnesses “were brought in
front of Congress today so that the voiceless could be heard.” NBC
anchor Brian Williams solemnly intoned that “a special House
committee heard emotional testimony from Katrina survivors who
insisted racism was a big factor in the government’s slow response
to the disaster.” And CBS anchor Bob Schieffer spat in the face of
honest reportage, singling out the most embarrassing of all the
witnesses, a rambling, ranting piece of work named Dyan “Mama D”
French, and insisting, “Congress isn’t likely to forget her. She
gave them an earful today.”
But an earful of what?
“We ain’t going nowhere,” Mama D told Congress. “Roaches and
black folks, they’ve been trying to exterminate, eliminate us. We
still there. We plan to be there.”
She was just getting warmed up.
“I was on my front porch,” Mama D declared. “I have witnesses
that they bombed the walls of the levee.”
When Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) began questioning her on
the specifics of the allegation — whether she’d witnessed the
bombing herself, how far she lived from the levee — and reminded
her that she was under oath, Mama D switched into full soothsaying
mode, her voice rising and falling like a Shakespearian crone, her
sentences incoherent but rife with dire warning, her eyes
intermittently focused:
“Mister, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m 62, and I
have to talk the way I talk. I’m Phi Beta Kappa too. But I have to
talk the way I talk. There was a military person in my house,
somebody who served his country well. When we started looking at
the — BOOM! BOOM! Mister, I’ll never forget it. He said, ‘Mama D,
that was a bomb.’”
But Shays persisted: “Can you see the levee from your
house?”
“I haven’t looked for it. I’m still looking for dead
people.”
“Can you see the levee from your house?
“Are you familiar with New Orleans?”
“So far I’ve asked you two questions and you’ve been very
unresponsive.”
“I don’t know what you’re calling unresponsive. Can I see? No I
can’t see you. I wear glasses. And I can’t afford to buy any. I
heard.”
“All we need are honest answers.”
“That is honest. I have no reason to lie to you. Who are you,
Mr. Shays? What have you done for me? I’m sitting up here, now, I
don’t know where I’m going to be tomorrow. Why would I have to sit
here and lie to you? Let’s get honest about it.”
When Shays pointed out that she still hadn’t answered his
questions, Mama D became indignant: “You can’t sit there and do
that, Mister. I’m 60, and even if I wasn’t in America, I wouldn’t
sit there and let you do that. I answered you. And my answers are
still the same. You got all the powers in your hand. I had to take
a bath when I got to Washington, or unless it would have been in
cold water. I’m 60 years old!”
To be fair, Mama D is likely a kind and decent soul; according
to news reports, she opened her house to flood victims. But
generosity doesn’t equate with rationality, and the fact that she’s
roughly the same age as Mick Jagger doesn’t confer wisdom:
“Please, give us some response. We don’t need the rhetoric.
Hubert Humphrey Institute said approximately 40 years ago that
African American children commit no more crime than any other
ethnic group. And 40 years later we’re looking at an incarceration
of almost 100 percent of young African American males. We need to
get on the right page here. Let me have all my babies. They’re
working in the jails free. Just let me have ‘em…and my mentally
ill children and adults. They’re hard workers. We can do more in
New Orleans than any group that you have there. Police brutality?
We’re used to that. We got to do something about that too. Us as
citizens. We got to remember that from the sixties. You can’t make
rules that oppress some of your people. All of us got to be full
Americans. And we don’t need to get violent about it. That’s just
human nature.”
IF MAMA D WAS THE SHINING star of the proceedings, the supporting
players followed her lead in their defiance of logic. Sitting
beside her was Leah Hodges, an overwrought, dreadlocked “community
activist” who seemed to channel the spirit of Angela Davis. In her
opening statement, Hodges repeatedly referred to a crowd of
evacuees stranded for several days on the high ground of a causeway
as a “concentration camp” — a characterization which caught the
attention of Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.), who respectfully noted
that, as bad as conditions were, “Not a single person was marched
into a gas chamber and killed.” But Hodges was adamant. “I’m going
to call it what it is,” she said. “That is the only thing I could
compare what we went through to.”
It was Hodges who, later in her prepared statement, trotted out
the most formulaic agitprop: “We have been exposed to genocide by
ethnic cleansing, the rights of our children have been violated.
Women’s rights against discrimination, our economic, social and
cultural rights have been violated. Our human rights have been
violated. Our rights against torture have been violated. Our rights
as prisoners of war within the scope and jurisdiction of the Geneva
Accords have been violated. Migrant worker rights have been
violated. These and all other violations both expressed and implied
arise directly from the failure of the United States government to
eliminate apartheid practices and all other forms of oppressive
government practices against poor and working poor citizens of the
United States, who are mostly African American or otherwise people
of color.”
At least she left out “Free Mumia!”
Evacuee Patricia Thompson, sitting beside Hodges, testified,
“When we stepped outside, guns were pointed on us. I felt like we
were being told to go outside in order to be killed.” Thompson
claimed that soldiers trained their machine guns’ laser sights on
the forehead of her five-year old granddaughter. When Rep. Shays
said he found that hard to believe, she replied, “You believe what
you want.”
“No one’s going to tell me it wasn’t a race issue,” Thompson
concluded.
That, in a nutshell, is the problem.
As McKinney declared, “Racism is something we don’t like to talk
about, but we have to acknowledge it. And the world saw the effects
of American-style racism in the drama as it was outplayed by the
Katrina survivors.”
Except racism is something that McKinney and her ilk love to
talk about, can’t stop talking about. They call congressional
hearings for no other purpose than to talk about it. And as the
Katrina hearing illustrated, when black people make claims about
racism — no matter how irresponsible, no matter how unsupportable,
no matter how farfetched — they’re not expected to meet even the
most rudimentary standards of logic and evidence. Not even if
they’re under oath. (Ironically, a sure sign of racism is the
failure to hold people superficially different from you to your own
intellectual and moral standards; in that sense, the entire
mainstream media which let pass the Katrina testimony without
pointing out its foolishness is indeed guilty of racism.) The
federal government’s response to the Katrina disaster did not prove
racism — except in the minds of people who need no proof, who’ve
already made up their minds, who will not listen to reason… and
who regard the expectation of reason by their listeners — as Reps.
Shays and Miller discovered — as a personal affront.
President Bush would do well to study the Katrina testimony
before he tries to “reach out” and “do a better job of
communicating.” It may not be worth the effort.
Mark Goldblatt (Mgold57@aol.com) is the author of
Africa Speaks, a satire of black urban
culture.
