Friday, September 02, 2005

Super catastrophe


WARNING: THIS POST IS NOT POLITICALLY CORRECT.
Has anybody else notice that the people at the Super Dome are all black? Look at the picture above? Do you see anybody but black people? For New Orleans:
The racial makeup of the city is 28.05% Caucasian, 67.25% African American, 0.20% Native American, 2.26% Asian, 0.02% Pacific Islander, 0.93% from other races, and 1.28% from two or more races. 3.06% of the population are Hispanic or Latino of any race. - New Orleans
Where'd everybody else go? Only 67% of the population is black, that's a little over 2 to 1 ratio of blacks and whites. So were is everybody else? The answer is they left before the hurricane in the mandatory evacuation. Is it part of the black culture to not retreat or something?
I'm not a racist and I don't think I would have noticed at all if I hadn't seen a picture of one white soldier among several black people.
While the condition at the Super Dome are terrible,
A 2-year-old girl slept in a pool of urine. Crack vials littered a restroom. Blood stained the walls next to vending machines smashed by teenagers. - LA TIMES
People there are making it worse by panic. It seems like the only people down there that get plastered across TV are either thugs (looters, drug users, etc), handicapped (mentally and physical), or just plain stupid for not having left when they had a chance. I know its easy to draw conclusions from this statement and previous ones. I'm not sure if making those conclusions is fair or not, but I'll leave that up to you. If you have any ideas feel free to share them within reason (I will delete any blatantly racist comments).
Having too any desperate people in one place is never a good idea and as we have seen, can make disasters areas into war zones.

UPDATE:
Commentators noted the victims of the hurricane were overwhelmingly African Americans, too poor to flee the region as the hurricane loomed unlike some of their white neighbors. - AP
They're poor because they're black?!? I hate media bias.

UPDATE:

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus, along with members of the Black Leadership Forum, National Conference of State Legislators, National Urban League and the NAACP, held a news conference and charged that the response was slow because those most affected are poor.

Many also are black, but the lawmakers held off on charging racism. - Fox News

Many others are now noticing the same thing I have noticed.

I still need at least one person to sign up to earn a free iPod shuffle so I can get mine.

2 comments:

Merlaak said...

WMDds is exactly right... many of the poor in New Orleans didn't own cars. Also, many, many of them were brought up by older people who had lived through many hurricanes... the storms had always come and gone and the levees had always held.

Also, while there have been many pictures circulating of old and ill people, I have seen plenty of pictures of perfectly healthy people who were desperate to find better conditions. Imagine for a moment that you live in a city and you don't own a car. Some kind of natural disaster hits and you can't find a ride out of town. The last thing you hear is that a lot of people are heading to the local stadium and convention center for shelter... you head there too. Before you know it, there are tens of thousands of people just like you looking for the same thing you are. Then, to make matters worse, authorities don't seem to be coming to the rescue.

I have to say that I'm disappointed that you would say that these people are "just plain stupid for not having left when they had a chance." Most of them had not the means nor any inclination that things were going to get as bad as they did. Anyway, there are my two cents.

Unknown said...

To say that they could leave even if they wanted to is somewhat ridiculous. Have you ever heard of public transportation or a taxi? They have those in cities you know. If you are too poor to buy a bus ticket out of town then you are probably homeless as well. And I don't think that that many people were homeless.
As merlaak put it I think it was much more likely that they had no inclination of leaving. And while you could say that is a valid excuse, there was a "mandatory evacuation". Which translates to, "you ARE stupid" if you don't at least try to leave! For goodness sakes, the thing was a catagory 5, that means BIG! Thankfully it was reduced to a catagory 3 before it hit land or it would have been a lot worse.