The Politics Of Division Destroy Racial Equality

GOPUSA ^ | September 21, 2005 | Kevin Fobbs

[KevinNuPac]

The Politics Of Division Destroy Racial Equality

By Kevin Fobbs

Hurricane Katrina clearly demonstrated that there are two Americas which Detroiters, metro Detroiters, and many suburban cities bordering on urban centers around the nation share. Each has been bound by an unbreakable bond between racial myths and actual facts.

The racially charged rumors that circulated throughout the nation's black communities concerning what many black New Orleans evacuees had been whispering during those first desperate days in the aftermath Hurricane Katrina devastation were clear and convincing to many black Americans. Washington Post columnist, Eugene Robinson had heard it too: that the massive levee breaks that caused the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina were the result of some government conspiracy. The racial fiction was being bandied about as fact.

Although clearly false, there were the racial inciters who I will label the pimps of racial persecution who openly engaged in the practice of encouraging this and other similar claims. They circled like vultures looking for the carcass of any perceived failed attempt by government to widen the fissure between races. The pimps of racial persecution took dead aim at Hurricane Katrina victims. The aftermath had all of the correct ingredients for a menu of perceived racial injustice.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin clearly alluded to the perception that the tens of thousands of his residents who could not escape the flood were black, poor and throwaway victims of federal government inaction. Nagin worked the fiction because the facts did not feed this race dividing scenario. He worked the myth and the persecution pimps responded in kind.

Enter stage left the two reverends riding to the rescue, Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson. The myth of a racist boogeyman is the type of equality they wanted to sell. They in fact and in practice became the soldiers of hate and the provocateurs of bigotry.

The myth became fact and the obvious anguish and horror which confronted the hundreds of thousands of evacuees; tens of thousands of them being black, worked well for the rescuing reverends. They dealt the nation The Race Card and myth won over fact.

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, not to be outdone added a new dimension to the phrase "Pimp My Ride". You see the ride that he was pushing sat squarely on the backs of poor blacks who were flooded out of their homes and saw their lives literally washed away. He claimed that there was a deliberate conspiracy to allow the black residents' neighborhoods to be flooded by a malicious act to damage the levees after Hurricane Katrina. He didn't need facts when a myth will do him and his cause better.

We have our own version of a Hurricane Katrina rumor mill and it has been a racial storm based again upon myth, conjecture, and firmly held impressions which over time have crystallized into hate.

Some old timers in Detroit remember the controversy former Dearborn Mayor Orville Hubbard stirred when he asked Dearborn city employees, in 1948 on Election Day, to distribute leaflets that read, "Keep Negroes out of Dearborn. Protect your Home and Mine!" Black Detroiters believed the wall of division and myth began then.

On the other hand many White suburban Detroiters have penned the origination of the racial division originating 31 years ago, when former Detroit Mayor Coleman A. Young demanded that criminals get out of Motown. He said "It's time to leave Detroit; hit Eight Mile Road!"

Many White suburban Detroiters felt it was a secret code to criminals to do all their raping, murdering and pillaging outside of the city's boundaries. Black Detroiters saw it differently and felt it was a way to tell crooks that the new mayor was going to remove the criminal vermin from the streets and neighborhoods.

Well, the accepted myth of secret racial codes imparted by Orville Hubbard or Coleman Young still became ingrained in both cultures for decades, and its continued acceptance is about as ridiculous as Louis Farrakhan saying that the levee breaks in New Orleans had been engineered at the expense black residents. These statements are borne out of racially tinged hyperbole. These notions are framed from a mythology of fear, ignorance or a lack of facts.

Now we fast forward to the remarks that Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick made in the first debate with challenger Freman Hendrix last week. When he said, "In Birmingham, in Bloomfield Hills and all these places they do more meth, they do more ecstasy, and they do more acid than all the schools in the city of Detroit put together."

Was it racially charged language meant to send a hidden code to Americans of African descent or was it meant to be a political haymaker where words like "Sellout" and "Uncle Tom" are also injected into the heated election fray as a way to energize a voter base?

This nonsense must end now. The ghost of racially charged separatist remarks must end so that black Detroiters and White suburbanites will begin to take the first affirmative steps toward ending the war of words, the dissention, the racial myths. Hurricane Katrina and Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick have given us a perfect opportunity to tear down the walls that separate us.

All of Metro Detroit alike should take a cue from the president. During his remarks given at last week's "National Day of Prayer and Remembrance Service," he said, "As we rebuild homes and businesses, we will renew our promise as a land of equality and decency. And one day, Americans will look back at the response to Hurricane Katrina and say that our country grew not only in prosperity, but in character and justice."

In Metro Detroit, as in America, we must learn to grow in character and in justice. We must rid ourselves of the simmering racial misconceptions that travel just beneath the surface in America and in Metro Detroit. Those walls which have been built up over nearly three generations must come down.

Hurricane Katrina woke America up. The walls of racial separation must come down so that off cuff remarks, and politically motivated comments will be viewed as just that and not as some secretive code to blacks that Whites are trying to take over, tear down, or submerge black people whether it is within the Detroit wall of 8 Mile Road or within the levees of New Orleans. The levee will be rebuilt in New Orleans and the walls erected by racial fear along 8 mile must come down if the Motor City is to return as a city that belongs to all of Metro Detroit and if the nation is to realize the fullness of its destiny in becoming a true melting pot for all Americans.

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Kevin Fobbs is President of National Urban Policy Action Council (NuPac), a non-partisan civic and citizen-action organization that focuses on taking the politics out of policy to secure urban America's future one neighborhood, one city, and one person at a time. View NuPac on the web at www.nupac.info. Kevin Fobbs is a regular contributing columnist to the Detroit News. He is also the daily host of The Kevin Fobbs Show on News Talk WDTK - 1400 AM in Detroit. Listen to The Kevin Fobbs Show online at www.wdtkam.com daily 2-3 p.m., and call in toll-free nationwide to make your opinion count at 800-923-WDTK(9385).

[Mr. Rational]

There were a few other "messages" missed in this fiasco.

The soft bigotry of low expectations has had a tremendous price.

[rocksblues]

Race Baiters DuJour!