Despite Blige, Katria Did Not Discriminate

Ever since hurricane Katrina landed in the Gulf we have been inundated with the idea, from race baiters, that the storm affected the poor, especially the poor black population, more than anyone else. Kanye West went on national TV to tell America that George Bush does not care about black people and we had many of the familiar criminals like Jackson and Farrakhan spewing the same things. Farrakhan even went so far as to say that the levee near the poorest black neighborhood was blown up to protect the whites. Recently Mary J Blige had this to say:

She is a happier person than she was, but she doesn’t think America’s changed at all when it comes to race relations. “The blacker you are, the worse it is for you. If you’re mixed, you’ve got a shot. If you cater to what white America wants you to do and how they want you to look, you can survive. But if you want to be yourself, and try to do things that fit you, and your skin, nobody cares about that. At the end of the day, white America dominates and rules. And it’s racist.”

She was very active in the Hurricane Katrina benefits; the tragedy struck a particular chord, since it happened not that far from where her grandmother used to have her to stay, in Savannah, Georgia. “All I can remember is her going, ‘Put some clothes on! You all put some clothes on!’ ”

“Everybody should look at Katrina,” she says. “Don’t act like it can’t happen to us. That’s how it’s been for years [the rich-poor divide, she’s talking about, broadly]. I haven’t seen anything change. I’ve just seen things get worse. We would have been those people in New Orleans, the people who couldn’t get out, the people who died.” (emphasis added) Guardian

First of all, the idea that if you are blacker you have it worse is ridiculous. Blige, Jackson, Farrakhan, 50-cent, P- Diddy and a great number of other blacks have made it very well in this country and their color spans a large range of “blackness.” I posted recently that, by percentage of population, whites died at a greater rate in New Orleans. Now there is a new article indicating that the storm killed across the economic spectrum. This is from the LA Times:

The bodies of New Orleans residents killed by Hurricane Katrina were almost as likely to be recovered from middle-class neighborhoods as from the city’s poorer districts, such as the Lower 9th Ward, according to a Times analysis of data released by the state of Louisiana.

The analysis contradicts what swiftly became conventional wisdom in the days after the storm hit — that it was the city’s poorest African American residents who bore the brunt of the hurricane. Slightly more than half of the bodies were found in the city’s poorer neighborhoods, with the remainder scattered throughout middle-class and even some richer districts.

The initial knee-jerk reaction among the liberals, fueled by the organized effort to get the word out that Bush had a pathetic response and it was because the residents were poor and black, was a deliberate attempt to use the suffering of all people affected for political gain. To this day we have elected officials discussing the Katrina administration and their pathetic response. This is usually said without reference to the pathetic actions of state and local government and despite the fact that many who did not leave, chose not to leave, despite Blige’s claim to the contrary (“could not get out”).

I get tired of discussing Katrina and I am aware that it took place several months ago but I am more weary of the constant lies associated with the event and the efforts at recovery. I am tired of hearing how the poor and the black were affected because of overt racism in the government when all the facts indicate otherwise and common sense tells us differently. I am tired of the attempts to rewrite the history of events for political gain. This is a concerted effort among the left. They want to say it enough times so that people begin to believe it.

The donks will shy away from the issue of the War in Iraq when election time rolls around but you can bet Katrina will begin to get air time once again as election season comes upon us.

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