CNN is finally covering a story that I heard on Saturday on This American Life (Episode 296) on WAMU. Hundreds of people who were trying their damnedest to evacuate New Orleans on foot were stopped and shot at by crazed gun-toting cops from Gretna, a relatively dry (and electrified) town on the West Bank. The This American Life story featured a long interview with Lorrie Slonsky, a white woman, who was in town for, ironically enough, a paramedic conference. These tourists were evacuated from their hotel and told to wait for buses that never came. After they were told numerous lies about where these buses were, a police commander finally told them to walk 2 miles to the west side of the city and go over the bridge to Gretna, where buses, or at least drinkable water and dry land, would be waiting.
At the end of the long walk, during which the small group was joined by hundreds of other lost people, they were met with the armed-and-dangerous barrier of Gretna’s finest. Slonsky and her husband managed to approach a police officer (by putting hands in the air, waving fireman’s badges, and walking slowly backwards) and asked why they could not cross over into Gretna, whose lights were twinkling invitingly in the darkness. After some blustering about “it’s not safe”, the cop said, “we will not allow Gretna to become another Superdome”, and that was that.
So the crowd of mostly black people, tired, starving, disabled, elderly, children… dispersed and went their separate ways to seek shelter. The interviewee ended up with a mixed group of about 60 people, who found a perfect shelter on an empty overpass. They set up camp there and worked out shelters, pooled their food and water to ration amongst themselves, and set up sanitary makeshift outhouses. After all this was accomplished and they were peacefully waiting, another Gretna police officer, crazed beyond belief and waving a gun, ordered them to leave the overpass. Needless to say, he offered no helpful suggestions about where to go. Then a police helicopter that was hovering nearby suddenly dropped close to the overpass so that its wind would scatter all the shelters and personal effects, then lifted away.
The group ended up breaking into a bus and sleeping there with their heads out of sight so they wouldn’t get shot.
More stories like this will surface, and the inexcusable and utterly abhorrent racial attitudes of white southerners will finally be subjected to some much-needed scrutiny.
I grew up in Texas and I know these racist people, I know their knee-jerk reactions and their refusal to see blacks as anything but base animals. Yes, we can certainly blame these racist individuals for their dangerous and immoral behavior. But I also know that the local, state, and federal governments, under the spell of the religious right, the anti-”PC” whiners, the enemies of the welfare state, and yes, the bigots, are ultimately responsible for tacitly, if not blatantly, encouraging this behavior. You will hear a lot of arguments like this:
“It’s not racism, we were just trying to protect our town from the looters we heard about on the news.
“We’re not racists, we’re realists.
“We’re not racists, we just think that some people are given an advantage in this world that they don’t deserve.
“We’re not racists, we just couldn’t help all those people because we didn’t have enough to go around, and there would have been riots.
“We’re not racists, it was better for those people to stay where they were. They’re used to these kinds of conditions anyway.”
Well, it smells like racism to me, from the gun-waving deputy all the way up to the president of the United States. Perhaps now there will be some more steps forward, some more positive change. But it will be painful. It’s a tragedy that so many people had to die in order for us to see our country clearly for what it is. We are all at fault here. We need to change.