pattylou said:
Separately to TRCSF: Yeah, I think it's classism and not racism. I grew up in an area with poor white folks who hated blacks. I saw their attitude towards blacks and it was horrific - along the lines of dragging them behind pickups because they were black.
If this hurricane had hit where I grew up, the white poor people would have been forgotten as easily as the poor black people (who have not been tied up to pickups and dragged around) were forgotten.
The reason I think it is important to make the distinction between classism of this nature and racism, is that nothing we saw in NO that the impoverished blacks suffered was anything like the horrific treatment blacks would have received where I grew up decades ago. But it is exactly like the treatment poor whites would have received.
So: (1) it is much less pointed and hateful than the sort of racism that we have seen historically, thus the term doesn't really "fit" and (2) poverty seems sufficient to explain it.
It seems like a distionction worth pointing out. We *HAVE* made strides in combatting racism. There is a hell of a long way to go.
That's true with *any* inequality in our society.
Oh, I disagree.
Yes, things have changed since the 1960's, but I think superficially.
Limbaugh's comments indicate that. Instead of bigotry being out in the open, it's only been driven underground. It's not like those people who attacked those little black children for going to desegregated schools have disappeared. It was only forty years ago. Barbara Bush. George W. Bush. Rush Limbaugh.
Kanye West didn't say that George Bush doesn't like black people for no good reason.
There was a Louisiana congressman who, today, said it was a good thing that God finally wiped out that public housing (sounds classist, I know, it's really racist.)
There was a conservative talkshow host who referred to the refugees as "scumbags". I don't think he's talking about the white refugees.
Look at the video of the convention center and superdome and astrodome. New Orleans is ~70% black, but those poor people are ~99% black.
They tried to walk out of New Orleans, but they were turned away by lines of police officers, using police dogs.
It was a mirror image of police meeting the civil rights marchers with police dogs.
The man who's often been called "the spokesman of the right" called the black mayor of New Orleans a n*gger. It doesn't get worse than that. Do you know much about the Rwanda massacre? They used radio talkshow hosts to drum up propaganda in the slaughter of certain ethnic groups. There's little difference.
I'm not trying to minimize the plight of poor whites in the Lake George Disaster. I'm as sympathetic towards the poor as anybody can possibly be. But I think it's a lot worse right now to be poor and black, than poor and white.
As a recent African American entertainer recently said (his or her name escapes me): "After 9-11, we were Americans. Now we're back to being n*ggers.)
I apologize if I've rambled.
Better yet, as Jon Stewart says, in the aftermath of Katrina, Bush is suggesting a day of prayer. But, er um, isn't a hurricane an act of God? 
