Posted on 09/30/2005 6:52:24 AM PDT by SJackson
Today Frontpagemag.com has assembled a distinguished panel to discuss what happened and why someone like Jared Taylor is singled out to be the messenger, and what the events themselves and the silence that surrounds them tells us. Our guests today are:
Debra Dickerson, the author of the prize-winning memoir An American Story and of her recent book The End of Blackness. Educated at the University of Maryland, St. Mary’s University, and Harvard Law School, Ms. Dickerson has been both a senior editor and a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report and a columnist at Beliefnet.
Jennifer L. Hochschild, the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government at Harvard University, with a joint appointment in Afro-American studies and lectureships at the Kennedy School of Government and the Graduate School of Education. Her interests lie in the intersection of American politics and political philosophy, particularly with regard to racial and ethnic politics and educational and social policy. Her recent research focuses on the meaning of the American dream and how it is perceived by Americans of different races and classes.
Carol Swain, professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of the highly acclaimed Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress. Her most recent books include The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration and Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism. She calls herself a truth speaker on the difficult issues of our day.
and
Marc Cooper, a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine and L.A. Weekly, he is the author of the recent book, The Last Honest Place in America: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas. Cooper has had published articles, essays, and interviews in numerous publications over the past 30 years. He hosts "Radio Nation" on public radio and teaches journalism at USC's Annenberg School of Communication.
FP: Debra Dickerson, Carol Swain, Jennifer L. Hochschild and Marc Cooper, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.
Dr. Swain, let me begin with you.
What do these events (the rapes, killings, the posturing of the Mayor and Jackson and others) tell us? What does the silence of the press about these events tell us? What does the fact that someone like Taylor is the messenger tell us?
Swain: The violence in New Orleans reminds us of the words of Thomas Hobbes. Life in a state of nature, he argued, is poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The fact that conditions degenerated so quickly is a sign of the spiritual poverty of a small element within the black community. The violence is especially unfortunate because, when one person commits a heinous act against another person, the entire community suffers from the resulting stigma and shame. These horrid events highlight a critical need for people to be guided by moral and ethical principles such as those found in the Ten Commandments and in the Golden Rule with its admonition to treat others the way you want them to treat you. It is a spiritual poverty as much as a material poverty that explains the desperation of many black people and their failure to fully overcome the vestiges of the past.
Many people failed to exercise commonsense at the height of the crisis. There is plenty of blame to go around. Race relations, however, are worsened by the diatribes of black leaders hurling accusations of white racism while carefully avoiding any serious condemnation of the lawbreakers. The posturing of the Mayor and some of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus were unfortunate tactical errors that make all blacks seem morally deficient. It is high time for black political and religious leaders to make black crime reduction the number one priority for the black community. It is time for black leadership to stop making excuses for inexcusable behavior like rape, murder, and looting of non-survival goods.
Jared Taylor was not needed to raise the consciousness of the nation. At the height of the crisis, there were plenty of other media outlets focused on the lawlessness of blacks. What was captured on television screens, however, was the bad behavior of a criminal element that exists in every racial and ethnic group. Given the right set of conditions, even our most civilized Mr. Taylor could resort to heinous acts of violence against other human beings. As the prophet Jeremiah reminds us in 17:9, the human heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, who can know it? The name Katrina means purification. Without God in the world, or actively working in our lives, we are doomed. FP: Thank you Professor Swain. In your next turn in the following round, could you kindly elaborate on your remarks about excusing inexcusable behavior and reflect for us not only on this syndrome in the black community but its reinforcement by liberal whites and then on the impact such low standards have on the black community itself? Mr. Cooper? Cooper: Let me start by noting the rather generous characterization our moderators have made of Jared Taylor. Mr. Taylor is not just a "white nationalist" but is, in fact, a rather blatant White Supremacist whose public work brims with affirmations that blacks are inferior. I don't think that some consideration of this source itself is out of the question and I think it beyond sloppy to accept his narrative as is. Taylor's report is swollen with innuendo and starved for any sourcing or attribution. Just swallowing the word of someone who is basically a Klansman does not seem a very appetizing option. "To be sure, the story of Hurricane Katrina does have a moral for anyone not deliberately blind. The races are different. Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization-any kind of civilization-disappears." This is what our hosts call "racist conclusions?" I think a more appropriate characterization would be that they are the feverish ravings of a full-on, right-wing moonbat, no? I am sure, nevertheless, that some of the barbarities that Taylor describes are based on fact. I'm just as certain that he has inflated, exaggerated and skewed them to fit his blatantly racist world view. Further, I don't understand why our friends at Frontpagemag claim to be appalled "that no other journalist or commentator had the courage" to describe these events as they were happening.. Indeed, I find NO original reporting in Mr. Taylor's rant whatsoever. A simple Nexis search reveals that all of the eyewitness quotes he offers were merely lifted from mainstream media sources i.e from stories that we had, in fact, already read or could have read. That would make Taylor more of a skilled copier than the messenger of any substantial observation. His only contribution, if you wish to call it that, was to re-assemble already existing reports in a way to most disfavorably portray blacks. I, for one, certainly knew about similar outrages from other and much more reliable and mainstream journalists and commentators very early on. Indeed, on September 1, I wrote on my own blog that "gangs of looters" were roaming the city and noted that this said "something very ugly about our species." I learned of the looting and shooting from Reuters and AP among many other immediately available and far more legitimate news sources. Stories of rape and murder were also carried day after day by all of the major networks. What's new in Taylor's assemblage, other than unsourced superlatives? In that same September 1 blog posting of mine, I also referred to a piece by Slate's Jack Shafer who took the media to task - at that early stage of the crisis-for downplaying the fact that not only most of the looters, but also most of the victims (as well as most of the population in New Orleans) were black. So, yes, early on the totality of the racial dimensions of this catastrophe were under-reported. Both in terms of victims and victimizers. I also think that Shafer's explanation for this early omission was quite insightful. No question that there is a squeamishness around race that pervades the mainstream media; a fear of being politically incorrect too often leads to a reluctance or - yes, a refusal-to report uncomfortable facts. With hours and hours of air time to fill in its non-stop coverage, however, the media eventually did get around to reporting on race. And at this late juncture, I find it to be simply untrue that "someone like Taylor is the messenger" of these stories. Similar horrifying anecdotes have been reported in the last two weeks by myriad sources. I'm tempted to ask, instead, why has Frontpagemag chosen such a tainted figure around which to stage this debate? I find little surprising or revealing by the events themselves. If I would extract one grand lesson from the incidents of violence, whatever their real scope, it would be that these prove that blacks are pretty much like everyone else in the world. Very thin lines separate all civilization from barbarism and it is a barrier easily violated and erased when the right mix of circumstances are presented. I hardly think that New Orleans African-Americans have invented or even improved upon the long-standing methods of civil disorder as have been practiced by every race on the globe at some time or another. From the way these matters are posed to us from the moderator, I suppose there's at least the implicit question as to whether armed violence significantly impeded the relief effort. I would say only this: if such disorder was threatening to derail disaster management or was effectively impeding it, then so much more urgent would have been the deployment of sufficient security forces (National Guard and Army) - forces that did not appear for nearly five days after the deluge. Certainly, the United States Army should be able to effectively deal with some improvised urban marauders, no matter what their color. FP: Well to be fair to us, Mr. Cooper, we did say in black and white (no pun intended) that Jared Taylor “draws racist conclusions that we find repugnant.” It is just an evasion to dismiss Taylor because of his racial views, since you yourself concede that his report, which documents the mistreatment of poor blacks at the hands of New Orleans black elite, is factual and based on reporting you yourself have read and whose veracity you yourself do not doubt. Nonetheless we accept that even the most civilized writer for the Nation (and we regard you as just that) will try to tar us with the racist brush for having the temerity to raise such politically incorrect matters as the incompetence of the black administration of New Orleans its disregard for the safety of its citizens and the lawless outrages of some of its black citizens and the conversion of this civil atrocity into its opposite: white racism. This has been the cheap, vicious and unconscionable refrain of liberals and progressives writing for the Nation and other journalistic institutions. If blacks commit atrocities, even if these atrocities are against other blacks, the liberal world will give them a pass, and find a way to blame the entire calamity on whites. That is the issue. Your claim that the details in Taylor’s report can be culled from various sources on the web and in the media misses the point entirely. It’s the picture -- the whole -- that is the issue. New Orleans is a city with a black majority run by blacks – with black mayors since 1978 – and leftwing blacks at that. It has a police force run by blacks that is famously corrupt and proved itself in this tragedy to be a national disgrace – without incurring a fraction of the criticism that George Bush did, when Bush had only a fraction of the responsibility for what happened. What other police force would have ten percent of its officers walk off the job in the midst of a crisis? What if the ten percent of New York’s police force had walked off the job in the middle of the 9/11 crisis? You think no one would have noticed? What other mayor would offer to send this same police force for a vacation in Las Vegas at taxpayer expense only five days into the disaster while people were still waiting to be rescued and dying if they were not? And what other mayor who did that would not be run out of town on a rail (figuratively) by the national press? Only a black mayor could get away with incompetence, arrogance, and heartlessness like this. And of course the fact that he is a leftist who blames the tragedy in New Orleans on the Iraq war doesn’t hurt. If New Orleans were run by Trent Lott and its police chief were also white, what do you think you and the rest of the media would be writing about this tragedy? Are you afraid to blame the local Democrats – mainly black – who mainly responsible for the failure to deal with this hurricane. Are you outraged by the anti-white racism is streaming across the airwaves? Obviously not. It was left to a white racist Jared Taylor to point out these depressing truths – but they are truths, that’s the fact. (Jack Shafer’s Slate piece, to which you refer, does not speak to these issues, either in part or in whole.) How much of the suffering of poor black people in this country is at the hands of black politicians like Ray Nagin who know they can get away with murder because of the double standards of reporters like yourself? This is the issue we want you to deal with, along with the question of how it was possible not just for political demagogues like Howard Dean and Jesse Jackson but for the leftwing media generally -- from the New York Times to CommonDreams.org -- to spin this disaster into a crime committed by whites against blacks, and incite blacks to hate and fear the very people who are rescuing them and coming to their aid in this tragedy. Quite a feat. Dickerson: Jared Taylor is no messenger of any kind and, having read his lunatic ravings, I only agreed to participate to denounce his acceptance into ‘decent’ intellectual society. Shame on Front Page. It should have held out for a worthy lightning rod, let alone citizen or even human being, to be the catalyst for this conversation. Taylor is simply a racist and white supremacist who likes to type. There is no original reportage there, nothing that the rest of us didn’t hear, read and see as Katrina unfolded, yet his article’s purported thrust was the mainstream media’s refusal to ‘tell the truth’ about blacks. Ann Coulter was no where near the Superdome; a whole bunch of liberals were and that’s how we know anything we know about Katrina and its aftermath. I’d have to do some rereading, but if there’s more than three attributed sources in there, I’ll loot a Wal Mart and send Mr. Taylor another rifle to add to the horde he’s no doubt tending for the day when whites come to their senses and…well….you know. I was particularly struck by his fetishizing of the terror of the few whites’ ‘locked’ in the Superdome with all those feral blacks – it’s almost funny. Almost. Reminds me of the Mad TV spoof of the sorta senile elderly couple who think the EMTs they’ve accidentally called are home invaders there for rape and murder but especially rape. In their headlong terror – “it’s finally happened, just like we knew it would, Martha!” -- they claw their way out into the street and get smashed by a semi. In the 80s, I took a white co-worker to a BBQ joint in a perfectly boring part of the black part of town for an utterly uneventful lunch. For days after, she and the other office whites (I was the only black) told what can only be described as ghost stories, about the few times they’d been the only white somewhere and how terrifying it had been. This went on for some time. They ooh’d and ahhh’d and nodded soberly at each other’s stories of how nothing happened when they were alone with blacks. Apparently, some whites believe that when and where they enter, all Negro attention, which can only be violent, is immediately upon them. That lunch could not have been more uneventful, but to her, it had been a trip to deepest, darkest Africa were the natives are as violent, inexplicable and remorseless as any gorilla. I spent a minute or two recently trying to imagine those office mates in the Super Dome and how closely reality would gibe with their self-important grab of a center stage which existed only in their racist minds. Reading Taylor, and all the demands to ‘tell the truth’ about blacks, reminds me of the realization I came to a while back: this kind of thinking has less to do with an actual belief in black inferiority than with some whites’ need to feel special, desired, the center of all attention, the baseline against which all other groups must be measured. Think of it: with their family members suffering, dying all around them, defecating on the floor, scraping off their babies’ diapers and reapplying them, bartering for insulin and chocolate, what are blacks thinking about? White people. Man, blacks are stupid. Here’s another fascinating thing about white supremacy: it makes its believers lose all common sense and understanding of human behavior. Taylor oozes contempt for the black who supposedly defecated where he stood in a line at the Superdome rather than…..what? Get out of line and wait another four hours for his daily ration of water? Go the nonfunctioning, completely overflowing toilets when the whole place was a toilet? What’s he really saying? ‘No white person would shit without dignity! Nevah!’ I have a four year old with asthma, a mother with severe hypertension. If that was a line for meds, what would I have done? Logic 101 just flies out the window when there’s an opportunity for whites like Taylor to elevate their race by inference. I also like the bit of nonsense where a gaggle of whites (what are they names? Who knows, just believe it.) are escorted out of the Superdome by Guardsmen for their own sainted safety, all the dismissing ‘pc’ black complaints of special treatment for whites. See, they were only getting special treatment…cuz they’re special. Let’s not forget the soldier recently (and conveniently) back from Afghanistan. “At least those folks want to help themselves. These folks just want you to do everything for them.” Why mobilize an entire nation of these folks have the capacity to care for themselves just now? Exactly what is it that a person who’s just survived a flood, a hurricane, and the loss of every thing which makes one a functional human being supposed to do for himself? Why, build hisself a log cabin wi’ nuthin’ but a Bowie Knife and a Bible, dad gum it! If there is one bit of Taylor’s thinking which proves what a lunatic racism has made him, it’s his belief that only a black person would try to commander a rescue helicopter with the words “Get my family out of here!” In a piece dishonest to its core, Taylor is so blinded by a white supremacy which can only be maintained by denigrating others, that he can’t even tell that he should have doctored that quote. The irony is that works like Taylor’s are an equally pernicious kind of looting; when America is at its most vulnerable, weakened and in need of unity, when we most need to be able to depend upon, invest in and trust each other, he shoots us all in the back and steals our shoes. FP: Welcome Ms. Dickerson, it is a pleasure to have you with us. Allow us to welcome you to our pages as one of the most astute commentators on race issues. But pardon us if we say that your answer evades, like Marc Cooper’s answer does, the difficult question we put to you for the easy and trivial task of putting Jared Taylor in his place. Even on this score, we have a question. Would you describe, say, a Derek Bell for example, as “simply a racist and black supremacist who likes to type”? And would you join a discussion only to denounce him, as though his racism were not repugnant to the overwhelming majority of the population at large? Both Bell and Taylor are intellectuals who comment on race issues from a racist point of view. But unlike Taylor who is marginalized in the culture, Bell is a cultural (and particularly a liberal) icon – a former Law School Dean at the University of Oregon, a former Law Professor at Harvard and currently a Law Professor at NYU, and in each of these positions an active racist and racial demagogue to whom people in respectable circles on the Left listen and pay respect. What’s the difference here except that Bell is black? Isn’t this the same double standard that makes allowance for black incompetence and worse in the New Orleans catastrophe while searching for a white demon to blame? You write: “I was particularly struck by [Taylor’s] fetishizing of the terror of the few whites’ ‘locked’ in the Superdome with all those feral blacks – it’s almost funny.” Would this be your reaction if the Superdome were filled with whites who intimidated a handful of blacks to the degree that they had to be escorted out by white security guards? And how can you compare the scene in the Superdome to a BBQ among office mates? In your next answer, I hope you will help, along with the rest of the panel, to get us back to the actual question we posed and that we wish to discuss -- which is not what any of you think of Jared Taylor (none of us here are going to disagree), but what you think about the politically correct reporting of this calamity and how the low standards of expectation for black officials like Ray Nagin and black leaders like Jesse Jackson and (another racist) Al Sharpton impact their communities.
I am not a Christian. But the human consequences of the devastation of New Orleans push me into Biblical quotations, ranging from Paul’s letter to the Galatians -- "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" – to the old aphorism, “judge not, lest ye be judged.” Mr. Taylor could do with a lesson in old-fashioned charity.
But his essay on “Africa in Our Midst” calls for more than pious incantations, and my responses range from fury to deep concern about the situation he is calling our attention to. Some parts of the essay are simply despicable and don’t warrant discussion, starting with the title and including at least the last four paragraphs. Other parts merely display execrable purple prose – “many victims will not be found for weeks or even months, rotted beyond recognition, their killers never found. Drowned or murdered, the bloated, stinking bodies that turn up by the hundreds will look much the same,” and more to that effect. But some elements are important.
First, it is not yet clear how much gratuitous looting (electronics rather than food), violence, and rape actually occurred; sociologists who study disasters warn us that reports of mayhem are almost always highly exaggerated. And there are obvious political reasons for some people, ranging from the incompetent or fearful local police to the criminally negligent federal authorities, to exaggerate the number and activities of the bad guys. Further, any large city experiences rape, theft, and violence over the course of any given week, so the issue at hand is not criminality but what an academic might call excess criminality. In short, we need to be careful not to overreact -- perhaps my friend was wrong when he opined (from the safety of a convention hotel far away) that what we were seeing was evidence of the failure of the European enlightenment.
Second, there is a very fine line, or perhaps the right metaphor is that of a slippery slope, between grabbing baby formula as it floats by, to entering a devastated grocery store to pick up baby formula from the floor, to breaking a grocery store window to get to the baby formula, to taking some other food from the floor on the way to the baby formula, to taking some things that are not strictly needed for survival on the way to the formula, to taking some things that are not strictly needed instead of the formula, to holding someone up at gunpoint to get the formula for one’s own starving baby, to holding someone up at gunpoint to take the rest of their food for one’s starving spouse or mother, to holding someone up at gunpoint to take the rest of what they looted or “found,” to... And all of this in waist-deep water full of waste, with no evidence that anyone cares or even knows that you and your family have been left in the drowned city. I have gone through this tendentious list in order to remind us of how small the steps are from what we would all justify to what most of us would condemn; can any of us be sure that we would stop at the “right” place on this slope under these conditions?
Another distinction is essential – between looting and violence. Visible looting is a crime, but centuries of exploitation of the old, the sick, the poor and, yes, the non-white, is too. White-collar crime is much less visible, except for the occasional Enron, but it arguably causes at least as much pain and damage to its victims as does stealing a television set. I don’t condone looting (however it is distinguished from finding), but poor people who steal when abandoned by all those responsible for order are not as morally culpable as those who murder or rape.
My one point of agreement with Mr. Taylor is that rapists and shooters should be held to account, if at all possible in the chaos. Christian exhortations for humility and sociologists’ warnings about terrible life circumstances notwithstanding, people who shoot at rescue helicopters should not be able to get away with it. But neither should those entrusted with public safety, from Mayor Nagin to the police chief to FEMA head Mr. Brown to President Bush. Vastly more people died because of them than because of the people Mr. Taylor is writing about.
FP: Welcome to FrontPage Professor Hochschild, it is a pleasure to have you with us. Your points are well-taken, but now, as we enter the second round, we would like to direct you and the rest of the panel to the main question with which we started.
There were 50,000 people in New Orleans without vehicles (this from the U.S. Census) and therefore without their own means to escape. Then there was the famous parking lot with the rows of drowned school buses which were not used to evacuate those people. According to press reports these buses could have taken 12,000 people to safety per trip. There was ample warning five days before the storm hit. So it is not a stretch to conclude that if the Mayor of New Orleans and the New Orleans Police and perhaps the Governor of Louisiana had done their jobs, no citizen of New Orleans would have been trapped or died.
Evacuation is in the first instance the responsibility of local officials, and the Mayor in particular. As you know the federal government is barred from taking action in these situations until asked to do so by local officials who were slow, very slow to respond. Yet the din of blame in the first days and actually throughout this crisis has fallen heavily on least culpable parties -- George Bush and the hapless and unqualified head of FEMA, which is basically an assist agency.
Moreover, the Katrina calamity has been absurdly and destructively turned into a moral lesson about white racism – as though white people had some control over the hurricane’s path or are responsible for the fact that black citizens of New Orleans were not evacuated, which is not remotely near the truth. Why is white racism even an issue? The vast majority of resources coming to the aid of New Orleans black citizenry were white. New Orleans is a democracy in which black people are a majority and lo and behold have elected their own black mayors since 1978 including the present incompetent one. Even the federal troops who were mainly white and who came to the rescue were headed by a general who is black. So why are we talking about white racism at all? Shouldn’t we be celebrating these remarkable circumstances in 21st Century America instead of the harking back to the bad old days of segregation which you would have be over forty to even remember? And shouldn’t the media and those black and liberal politicians – Howard Dean prominently among them -- who have indulged in this inflammatory racial nonsense be ashamed?
This is one of the key questions we would like all of our panelists to confront. Dr. Swain?
Swain: Although we are united in our condemnation of Jared Taylor, it is important to note that the New Century Foundation, an organization he heads, has recently published the second edition of a volume called The Color of Crime: Race, Crime, and Justice in America, where he uses FBI statistics to support his contentions that blacks are more criminal than other racial and ethnic groups. In the past, Taylor’s data have been reanalyzed by researchers who have not quibbled with his numbers. Indeed, his volume has been cited by mainstream media outlets. Because of his ability to reach a wide intellectual audience, we need to take him seriously by addressing his arguments about the unacceptable levels of crime within the black community.
We make a mistake when we argue that an extreme level of poverty is a justification or an adequate explanation for the black crime rate. Clearly, there are other parts of the world stricken with dire forms of poverty and injustice, where the locals have not used their lot in life to justify acts of violence against fellow human beings. Black political leadership must tackle the issue from within. Nothing is gained by attributing dysfunctional behaviors in the black community to the legacy of slavery or present day white racism. Therefore, accusing George Bush and FEMA of racism because of the quality and timing of their response to Hurricane Katrina is misguided, especially since it has become clear that local officials were derelict in their duties by turning away other states’ offers of assistance and by not making timely evacuation plans.
The facts suggest that it was a combination of factors including opportunism, poverty, inept political leadership at all levels of government, and indifference on the part of power-brokers in Washington that contributed to the chaos and loss of lives that followed Katrina. The diatribes of black leaders hurling accusations of white racism, while carefully avoiding any serious condemnation of the lawbreakers, were unfortunate because such predictable behavioral patterns merely serve to reinforce negative stereotypes about the group. Once the charges are leveled against white leadership, it becomes more difficult for black leaders to forge effective coalitions with them, even though coalitions are essential for the formation of more effective public policies.
Those of us who care deeply about the future of Black America should stop making excuses for unacceptable behavior. We must establish mainstream community standards for codes of behavior and hold all violators accountable to a higher code of justice. What we need is internal monitoring of the community, new norms of acceptable behavior, and swift justice meted out by community members. Until we address internal dysfunction with rough justice, crime will continue to accelerate providing much fodder for enemies of the group. Unlike the other contributors, I have not expended much space attacking Jared Taylor or the constituency he represents. Instead I close by repeating what I said in my comment in the first round. It is a spiritual, as much as a material, poverty that explains the patterns of violence and disregard for life and property so prevalent in many black communities. Black people need to rediscover their spiritual roots and their once deeply held belief in a living God that holds people accountable to a moral code of behavior. All people need to be guided by moral codes and virtues such as those found in the Golden Rule. Indeed, we have deep and lasting obligations to fellow human beings.
FP: Thank you Professor Swain for addressing the issue we have attempted to raise and doing with admirable good sense. Mr. Cooper?
Cooper: I start this second round by eagerly associating myself with the insightful remarks of Debra Dickerson. While I hold a genuine personal affection for FP's David Horowtiz and while I have always been convinced that – in spite of some of our sharp differences – he was and is absolutely sincere in his anti-racist convictions, all of my better instincts warned me that a verbal mud fight centered around a crank like Taylor would be of questionable value. I fear that is being proven so.
My friends at FP are claiming a desire to deflate what they see as the undue, unfair racializing of the Katrina catastrophe. To achieve this end they have chosen a declared white racist to lead their attack. But when we respondents have the temerity to point out that the 800lb elephant sitting in the middle of the living room is wearing a Klansman's hood, we are ruled out of order.
Please. That doesn't pass the giggle test. I have made no assertion that FP is racist. I have merely stated that Jared Taylor is a terribly tainted and self-interested source that cannot be taken seriously. Debra is absolutely correct in stating that FP has no need to stoop to such a low level and that your arguments would be much more compelling in the mouth of someone other than a believer in black genetic inferiority.
In that context, it's hardly an "evasion" to dismiss Taylor's report based on his racial views when the entire point of his rant is precisely to prove the inferiority of blacks in general and their alleged dysfunctionas a racial group in New Orleans.
And why do you insist that somehow the assemblage of scattered anecdotal material by a Klansman like Taylor is the "whole picture?" How on earth did you reach that conclusion? The whole picture, maybe, if one's pre-conceived bias is that blacks are jungle animals and no evidence to the contrary is permissible. The folks at FP have been around the mechanics of journalism long enough to know that any semi-literate character can assemble whatever picture he or she wants by the selection and omission of facts that – in themselves may be true (though I'm hardly suggesting that Taylor's work is even up to the smudgy standards of modern journalism).
I don't know that New Orleans's black mayor has gotten away with anything yet. Maybe I run in different circles than the FP, but I think there's a generalized sense in the country, and the media, that both he and the Democratic Governor did a rather piss-poor job of things. I certainly think they did. Their only saving grace is that Mike Brown's FEMA out-pissed them.
Yet, FP furiously continues to pummel a straw man – and a waterlogged one at that. The mainstream media has not portrayed the fiasco in NOLA as a case of whites persecuting blacks (If it has, please provide the links).. Nor have they lionized the Mayor and his police force. So I find the entire premise of this discussion to be rather flimsy.
If on the other hand, you are alleging that partisan figures who you mention, like Howard Dean, have tried to politically manipulate the situation and in so doing have pandered on the race issue, well… I suppose you are right. That's what politicians do, I believe.
But this is hardly a monopoly practice of the Democrats or the Left. We can say that conservatives can be just as bold and brazen. Look no further than this page where the FP doesn't flinch from using a White Supremacist to make its own case about the racial aspects of Katrina? Imagine, if …say… Howard Dean had prefaced his remarks on NOLA by quoting Reverend Farrakhan, perhaps with an FP-like disclaimer that "while his conclusions are racist" he still makes some very valid points? Come on, guys! We'd have to have stage a national fund-raiser just to buy the FP staff the necessary dose of post-cardiac attack medicine!
Indeed, just what is the point that FP is so eager to make here? And what is so compelling about it that they would go to the extreme of quoting an avowed racial extremist to make that point? Presumably, it's to prove the following:
"How much of the suffering of poor black people in this country is at the hands of black politicians like Ray Nagin who know they can get away with murder because of the double standards of reporters like yourself?"
To the first half of that statement I would, mostly, yawn and say well, yes, certainly black politicians and black elites can be as feckless, corrupt, incompetent and exploitative as their white counterparts. And so? Your second assertion that I employ professional double standards that allows black politicians to "get way with murder" only manifests either FP's wilful ignorance or malice. I see no evidence for your slur, because you can't find any. No reporter on the Left has been tougher on black political icons like Jackson, Sharpton and Mumia than yours truly. Shame on you for such a baseless assertion. I have repeatedly excoriated these men for racial demagogy and shameless hucksterism and I will continue to do so without flinching. Does this column of mine sound like I'm an apologist for black administrations because they are black? An excerpt criticizes both the Bush administration and the anti-war left for being unwilling to use force to stop the murder of Africans by African regimes:
"Not that Bush is going to take any risks for Darfur. The peace movement need not fret. No American combat troops will be sent in to tamp down the murderous gangs carrying out the slaughter. Not a single American soldier will die to stop the killing. Nor will there be any marches demanding such an intervention. Instead, Bush says he's backing a too-small African force of barely 2,000 troops whose leaders, last week, complained they have yet to see much of the cash promised by Bush and the other powerful nations on Earth.
Nor is the 82nd or the 101st Airborne about to drop a few thousand paratroopers into the Zimbabwean capital of Harare to expedite megalomaniacal dictator Robert Mugabe's much needed passage into the next world. We sit immobile as more than a million of the poorest people in the world are being forced at gunpoint from their shacks and even from their subsistence gardens by a regime literally gone berserk. And, again, there will be no pressure from the American right or left to do anything except watch --if that."
I don't mean to be so self-serving. But it is you, dear FP friends, that have made reporters like me and the rest of the "left-wing media" the issue here so I have no choice except to respond.
Finally, I don't share Ms. Swain's religious beliefs nor do I care much to focus worldly events through a biblical prism. She suggests that blacks should become better, more spiritual, more responsible human beings. But why only blacks? I much prefer the more universal and more thoughtful notion expressed in her following sentences:
"All people need to be guided by moral codes and virtues such as those found in the Golden Rule. Indeed, we have deep and lasting obligations to fellow human beings."
Agreed.
FP: Thanks Mr. Cooper. I am afraid you are still to answer our question.
Yes, Jared Taylor is a racist. We get your point. I think we got it after the first 20 times you said it. We said so ourselves when we introduced the symposium.
The issue is, Mr. Cooper, again: is Taylor any more racist than any multicultural separatist or “nationalist”? Do you write about racists like Derrick Bell, bell hooks, Spike Lee, Al Sharpton, Michael Eric Dyson in the same critical way that you write about Taylor? If you call Taylor a Klansman, then what do you call those individuals? And do you describe your own venue, The Nation, as shameful for printing them and the writings of dozens of other racists (which is more than we’ve done here)?
If this is not a double standard, what is? As for Ray Nagin, re-read what we wrote. Maybe we can put it more bluntly to avoid any ambiguity: every citizen of New Orleans who did not own a vehicle or could not move themselves out of New Orleans and who died, and most of these people were probably black, are on Ray Nagin’s account. He and he alone is responsible for what happened to them.
Mr. Cooper, we appreciate your respect and return it but we are much dismayed by your inability to see past Jared Taylor and to effectively deal with the issues we have asked you to discuss.
Finally, we suggest that perhaps you re-read what Carole Swain wrote. And think about it.
It is Debra Dickerson’s turn in this second round, but unfortunately her schedule became very hectic and she regrets she could not find the time to continue. Ms. Dickerson, thank you kindly for joining us in the first round. It is always a privilege to be graced by your presence and we hope to see you again soon.
Dr. Hochschild, let’s move on to you. Feel free to take the conversation in the direction you feel most significant, but kindly touch on my earlier questions -- especially on how the media and many black and liberal politicians have indulged in divisive and inflammatory rhetoric about Katrina, painting it as some kind of moral lesson about white racism. What do you think of the Black leaders such as Jackson and Sharpton who are exploiting this tragedy to spin their racial politics?
Hochschild: I actually don’t think it’s very productive, or even interesting, to argue over Jared Taylor and what he did or didn’t say that was redundant, wrong, vicious, truthful, or illuminating. He’s not very important. The central issue is what Katrina revealed, and what our nation is going to do about it. But I have been asked to comment on “how the media and many black and liberal politicians have indulged in divisive and inflammatory rhetoric...” and on “Black leaders... exploiting this tragedy to spin their racial politics.”
I have several responses, which may contradict one another. First, as Marc Cooper put it, of course politicians, activists, media commentators, and culpable officials are going to blame each other. Of course they will invoke external forces over which no one can expect them to have any control, and seek to apply old and cherished policy remedies to new and unprecedented circumstances. Of course blacks will blame whites, whites will point to their fear of enraged black mobs, and nuanced voices will mostly be drowned out. I’m shocked, shocked to discover gambling in the back room! One hopes, in addition, that this isn’t all that these actors do – somewhere along the line, they might actually generate some insights and useful interventions. But to point out that political discourse among the most energized advocates is racialized and coarse is shooting fish in a barrel.
Second, loud talk is sometimes what one does when one lacks power to do anything else. Black political activists insist on white racism; white political officials give no-bid contracts to their buddies that permit skirting of affirmative action regulations and that exempt contractors from paying prevailing wages to their workers. I’d rather be quietly handing out and raking in the billions than shouting into a microphone; presumably so would the shouters, but they don’t have that power. I wish they would focus more on actual malfeasance and misfeasance than on global generalizations, but I wish more strongly that the malfeasance and misfeasance were stopped and punished.
Third, I concur with, I think, all three of the other commentators in this symposium that Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco were incompetent and timid, if not venal and blind. One is black; both are Democrats. So? Whites and Republicans were also incompetent and timid, if not venal and blind. What this shows us is what we’ve always known; elected officials are most responsive to the constituents who provide their resources and votes – which is to say, the downtown business developers, the upstate voters, and the most well-connected interests. (That is not to say that any other political system is better, just that democratic politics are no panacea.)
Again, the central point is that the people left behind were there for reasons of structural bias deeply embedded in the American political, economic, and social systems. To evoke an old Marxist phrase, it is not coincidence that the people without cars or enough money to put gas in their car at the end of the month were deeply poor (that is a redundancy) – and disproportionately old or young or sick or black or some combination thereof. What Katrina revealed was not only media and politicians’ self-indulgence and stupidity, but also how vast the gap is that Americans permit between, say, the best-off 80 percent and the worst-off quintile. We – all of us with any political clout – have permitted income and wealth disparities to rise to the level of the Gilded Age, have permitted poverty to be strongly associated with race and geography and health, and have invoked well-off individuals’ right to ignore community interests until they need to be politely coaxed out of their French Quarter homes. We ignore what is inconvenient to deal with, whether that be inadequate levees, ludicrous “arrangements” for disaster relief, the costs of pushing experts out of FEMA, the inability of nursing home residents to drive to safety, or generations of black poverty. It is the structure and dynamics of permitted inequality, not the relative degrees of evil of a given looter or political official, that we should focus on.
FP: Thank Prof. Hochschild. Unfortunately I fail to understand your main points. Are you saying that actual, provable, malicious and unfounded accusations of racism by blacks and Democrats against guiltless whites are less important than hypothetical malfeasance by white politicians because white politicians have power (and black ones like Ray Nagin don’t)?
Also, the people left behind were not left behind by structures. They were left behind by actual living and breathing human beings -- human beings like Ray Nagin. He didn’t get them out and it was his responsibility to do so. Why can’t you and Marc Cooper face, let alone grasp, this issue? Could it be that perhaps you see the world only through structures and that the personal responsibility of individuals is a foreign (or perhaps threatening) concept to you?
In closing we would like to thank all of you for participating in this discussion and we hope you will all consider doing it again. Debra Dickerson, Carol Swain, Marc Cooper and Jennifer Dickerson, take care for now.
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