Racially Just Responses to Katrina
What would it take to truly repair the lives of African Americans, other peoples of color, and poor people after Katrina? Could this be an opportunity to create a model for society as it could be? A racially just society? What about the native peoples who preceded Europeans along the gulf? Is now the time to consider how to address Native American genocide and sovereignty issues? With these questions I will begin to document ideas for racially just responses to Katrina:
(1) Glen Ford at Black Commentator claims the Right of Return, a term usually associated with the right of Palestinians to return to their former lands, for the people of New Orleans:
Displacement based on race is a form of genocide, as recognized under the Geneva Conventions. Destruction of a people’s culture, by official action or depraved inaction, is an offense against humanity, under international law. In fact, it is imperative that we demand the Right of Return now, before the circumstances of the displacement create facts on the ground that cannot be reversed. We have seen, elsewhere in the world, how those who have been displaced are effectively shut out from returning to their origins. Others, newcomers, will benefit from the tragedy of the previous population’s displacement. This cannot be allowed to occur in New Orleans. The federal government has an obligation to direct every resource to making it possible and practical for them to return, and to live productive lives in the city from which they were driven.
(2) Human rights frameworks can provide a useful standard of how people should be treated in the short and long terms. The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) can be useful in pressing governments to ensure that outcomes of policies do not create or maintain racial disparity or discrimination. This is a novel way of addressing racism in a legal system focused on intent. The US has signed and ratified ICERD.
(3) I was reading about supposed murders in New Orleans and the Superdome which got me wondering whether the various levels of government can be held liable for criminally negligent homicide in the thousands of deaths that can be verified.
More to come…
September 13th, 2005 at 7:25 pm
Matt Welch at Reason magazine (not a particular supporter of antiracism) wrote a piece claiming that there are no substantiated reports of rape or murder among evacuees.
There is a really compelling racist ideological motivation for these rumors, namely, that white folks along the Gulf Coast (and I know this first hand, because they are my people) are, among other things, terrified of the unconstrained black body. There are many reasons for this, and it goes back at least to miscegenation during slavery, lynchings after slavery, and the perceived threat of black sexuality.
A lot of this aggression-as-fear toward black bodies comes out in an irrational fear of black criminality. There is the belief that, unconstrained, black people descend to a kind of uncontrollable animality. And with the flood waters rising, those fears ratcheted up really high. I heard of phone calls between members of my distant family to precisely this
effect.
As soon as “those people” started gathering in the Superdome and being bused out of NOLA and into other areas, these stories spread along the Gulf Coast like wildfire.
I’m not saying there were no murders or rapes; but we should be careful to talk about ones that are absolutely confirmed by a coroner or the police or a media outlet.
September 14th, 2005 at 11:35 am
“A lot of this aggression-as-fear toward black bodies comes out in an irrational fear of black criminality.”
Given that blacks are more than 10X, ten times, as likely to assault/murder whites as vice-versa, which is also the approximate ratio of male/female violent crime rates, a concern among non-blacks for black criminality is not only rational but a reasonable response.
The ratio of sex crimes between blacks and whites is better than 50:1, or fifty to one. Clearly a pattern exists.
An organism either practices self-preservation or it does not survive.
September 14th, 2005 at 12:00 pm
First, I don’t concede either that crime statistic or what you take to be its implication. But even if it were true, it doesn’t make racial discrimination or racist beliefs against black people as such reasonable or justifiable. Even if black people were more likely to commit crime against whites than whites were to commit crime against blacks, that wouldn’t justify the paranoid fantasy that every black person is a criminal waiting to attack and destroy.
Further, the crime stories that white people along the Gulf Coast created were of black-on-black crimes — a kind of nastiness that gives schaudenfreude a bad name.
September 15th, 2005 at 11:29 am
Kendall,
“First, I don’t concede either that crime statistic or what you take to be its implication.”
Then try the FBI’s #’s, and you might believe. Please note that in a piece of anti-white duplicity, Hispanics are counted as white when they commit crimes, but as Hispanics when they are victims. There are none so blind as those with eyes who will not see.
http://www.fbi.gov/filelink.html?file=/ucr/2004/04prelim.pdf
“But even if it were true, it doesn’t make racial discrimination or racist beliefs against black people as such reasonable or justifiable.”
Not to you maybe, but it does to most whites, especially for their children’s schools. If you want to live in an integrated, or white minority area, go ahead. The trouble is that liberals seek to forcibly integrate white societies, and prevent whites from living among our own. Of course, non-whites seek whites societies to live in, as they themselves prefer the higher standards of living, lower crime, and better education. If they could do it on their own, they would.
“Even if black people were more likely to commit crime against whites than whites were to commit crime against blacks, that wouldn’t justify the paranoid fantasy that every black person is a criminal waiting to attack and destroy.”
US violent crime is most concentrated among males, between 15-40, of black or Hispanic descent. Read for yourself, and check the FBI’s #’s.
• Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery.
• When blacks commit crimes of violence, they are nearly three times more likely than non-blacks to use a gun, and more than twice as likely to use a knife.
• Hispanics commit violent crimes at roughly three times the white rate, and Asians commit violent crimes at about one quarter the white rate. (That’s NE Asians, not SE)
Interracial Crime
• Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.
• Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Forty-five percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.
• Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.
• Blacks are 2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa.
• Only 10 percent of youth gang members are white.
• Hispanics are 19 times more likely than whites to be members of youth gangs. Blacks are 15 times more likely, and Asians are nine times more likely.
When whites notice black/Hispanic crime, and attendant low achievement, then avoid them for safety, it is simple self-preservation, as well as a natural/universal preference people have for their own (Chinatowns). That blacks/Hispanics notice this and get their feelings hurt, rather than correct the problem, is evidence they want to live with us despite their resentment (if they did not care they would not complain) and of a large measure of denial (the problem is whites who notice our crime, not us who do it).
Either way, we whites as a distinct people have the right to preserve our culture and genes in our own societies, free from the predations of others. Fair is fair.
September 15th, 2005 at 12:07 pm
I looked at all 18 pages of http://www.fbi.gov/filelink.html?file=/ucr/2004/04prelim.pdf and I can’t find a single statistic about crime broken down by race. Crime reporting is notoriously unreliable, as has been well understood for a long time. It’s voluntary, done by police based on uncorroborated eyewitness accounts, and isn’t based on convictions or any legal process. If someone mugs me, and I call the police and say it was a black man, that goes down as a black-on-white crime. There’s no fact-checking or verification, only what I report to the police, and they report (or don’t report) to the FBI.
Hardly the basis of rational public policy.
Actually, the law just says everyone has to be given a fair chance to buy any house they can afford. This is a problem for a racist like you because you can’t differentiate between a person and what you take to be that person’s racial group.
All of yr attributions of crime causality to genetic determination can just as easily (with, I suspect, even more predictive and explanatory power) be attributed to social conditions like poverty, broken homes, and so on. The existence in many parts of the US of a healthy, thriving black middle and upper class demolishes yr genetic determinism. If blacks commit crime simply because they are black, then how is it that so many don’t commit crime? Because crime isn’t strongly correlated with race, no matter what you think the FBI’s statistics say.
And why the obsession with this supposed correlation when there are so many other ones? Men are vastly more likely to kill women than vice versa. I think we should lock all the men up or otherwise segregate them. That makes more sense than yr racist views about blacks and other non-whites.
In fact the southern states, as a group, have the highest homicide rates in the country. These high rates have led some to conclude that there is a “southern subculture of violence” wherein people in the south are more likely to resort to violence than in other areas. So why not build a wall around Old Dixie to protect the rest of us?
Enough of this nonsense, Stir the Pot. You’ve made yr “point”, such as it is, and I’m closing comments on this post.