Damn straight it is Racism !!

[G_j]

From Today's Democracy Now!

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/07/1415225

Residents Discuss Race and Hurricane Katrina

We speak with three residents of New Orleans who were forced to flee -David Gladstone, Beverly Wright and Curtis Muhammad - about who gets saved and who doesn't and even the question: will New Orleans be rebuilt?

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Curtis Muhammad: (a veteran Student Non-Violent Cooordinating Committee organizer and co-founder of Community Labor United.)

... I mean, here we are watching this thing happen, hearing the reporters talk about ambulances picking up people from the mostly predominantly white and upper middle class hospital at Tulane University, picking people up to evacuate them, and going right past the Charity Hospital where most of the Blacks were. And we had these reports of nurses using pumps by hand to keep people alive and stashing the dead in the staircase, and yet they were going uptown to empty out the predominantly white and middle class hospitals. And we were still skating.

Now, that convinced us that we had no caretakers. You know, those -- the Mayor at one point goes into the Superdome and goes into the Convention Center, and says, “Just go walk. Don't wait for help. Just get on the highway and walk out of here.” That actually happened. And they stopped them. They set up checkpoints and would not let the people leave the city for fear they were going to loot the dry towns, white towns, Kenner, Metairie up the road. And they started locking these shelters at night so people could not sneak away. And no help was still coming. Now, somebody break into place and get water and food, and we call it looting. And people are dying.

And Bush, the President, finally shows up six days later, and he says, “Zero tolerance for people who break into places to get food and water,” that that's the same as looting. How can you call looting when the whole town almost is under water and people are starving and nobody has been to see about them for six days? And those people are being criminalized and thrown in jail as we speak. So, when we gathered our forces, we began to travel through the shelters so that we could locate. We couldn't get cooperation from the government of where they were taking our people. But we just started going city to city up the highway, and every city, as we went out on 10 West, we traveled all the way to Houston. We started at Baton Rouge. Everything was filled. Churches, gymnasiums, civic centers, dormitories of college campuses where the students had brought the families into their dormitories.

But when we would go to the public shelters, they were almost like prisons. You could hardly get in. There was all kind of criteria for how you could get in to see the people that was almost like visiting somebody in prison. The people didn't have access to the world around them for fear, again, because on TV they had been criminalized already. So, though the communities were willing to accept them, they were not willing for these people to walk the streets of their town. They were eating sweets and Cokes, still, to the day – I came to this studio this morning having driven from Houston. Every little town between Baton Rouge and Houston had shelters with our people. And they were all managed by FEMA and Homeland Security and soldiers and National Guards, and the ability to go visit these people was like tremendously hard work.

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... So, we are convinced that the racism about the New Orleans black population, the black poor population, is so tremendous and so negligent and we don't know the reasons. And maybe so all black people. Maybe that's just – we just have this tremendous universal hatred for dark skin. I don't know what it is. But we watched blatant racism, blatant racism.

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