October 01, 2005
Lesser People
There seems to be two results of the widespread belief that the poorest black people of New Orleans were raping babies and shooting at one another almost at random. One is that everyone felt a little better, a little superior. It couldn't have been us because our community wouldn't have behaved like those animals.
The second is, of course, that it meant things were much worse during the crisis. Rescue workers stayed away after being told of a chaotic, unsafe scene of untold horrors.
What became clear is that the rumor of crime, as much as the reality of the public disorder, often played a powerful role in the emergency response. A team of paramedics was barred from entering Slidell, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, for nearly 10 hours based on a state trooper's report that a mob of armed, marauding people had commandeered boats. It turned out to be two men escaping from their flooded streets, said Farol Champlin, a paramedic with the Acadian Ambulance Company.On another occasion, the company's ambulances were locked down after word came that a firehouse in Covington had been looted by armed robbers of all its water - a report that proved totally untrue, said Aaron Labatt, another paramedic.
A contingent of National Guard troops was sent to rescue a St. Bernard Parish deputy sheriff who radioed for help, saying he was pinned down by a sniper. Accompanied by a SWAT team, the troops surrounded the area. The shots turned out to be the relief valve on a gas tank that popped open every few minutes, said Maj. Gen. Ron Mason of the 35th Infantry Division of the Kansas National Guard.
Even those "shots at rescue" helicopters have turned out to be false. Even if there had been one or two such shots, it should not have been reason for all flights to stay away. We drive everyday on highways where one or two accidents occur, surely rescue workers know better than to stop completely flying into a city because of an unsubstantiated rumour. But, it turns out, even that wasn't true:
For military officials, who flew rescue missions around the city, the reports that people were shooting at helicopters turned out to be mistaken. "We investigated one incident and it turned out to have been shooting on the ground, not at the helicopter," said Maj. Mike Young of the Air Force.
Again, it wasn't that nothing unseeming happened. About a million people were left behind in destitute conditions; I'm sure not everything was dandy. But the reports were so outrageous, so outside the sphere of the normal human experience. If we were a decent country, there would be deep soul-searching not just about how it is that we abandoned those people, but we believed --all of us, even they themselves-- the absolute worst about what they would do without strong external authority imposed upon them.
Posted by zeynep at 09:52 AM | Comments (0)
September 28, 2005
Looks Like Black People Don't Rape Babies at First Opportunity
Remember all the reports of how babies were being raped in the Dome and the Convention center, and how some conservative commentators were arguing that the "The swiftness of New Orleans' descent from chaos into barbarism" was an indicator in favor of a Hobbesian view of human nature -war of all against all?
Well, guess what? Turns out black people don't turn around and murder each other and rape babies as soon as the po-lice disappear.
Reports of Anarchy at the Superdome OverstatedAs floodwaters forced tens of thousands of evacuees into the Dome and Convention Center, news of unspeakable acts poured out of the nation's media: People firing at helicopters trying to save them; women, children and even babies raped with abandon; people murdered for food and water; a 7-year-old raped and killed at the Convention Center.
Police, according to their chief, Eddie Compass, found themselves in multiple shootouts inside both shelters, and were forced to race toward muzzle flashes through the dark to disarm the criminals; snipers fired at doctors and soldiers from downtown high-rises.
In interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Compass reported rapes of "babies," and Mayor Ray Nagin spoke of "hundreds of armed gang members killing and raping people" inside the Dome. Other unidentified evacuees told of children stepping over so many bodies "we couldn't count."
The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, overwhelmingly African-American masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them. The mayor told Winfrey the crowd has descended to an "almost animalistic state."
Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence. The piles of murdered bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines assert that, while anarchy reigned at times and people suffered indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened.
In fact, history is clear on this point. The aftermath of most natural disasters is similar: incredible acts generosity, cooperation and selflessness, punctuated by rarer ugly acts of opportunity and cruelty. And yes, if help does not arrive, things do become more chaotic with time.
I'm not arguing that nothing happened. In fact there was one confirmed murder at the Dome. Maybe a few more will surface with time. And yes, rape is very much underreported so I am sure there were some rapes, as there always are where there are men. But raping babies? In the middle of tens of thousands of people, succeeding in pulling children from their parents and raping them? Please.
Only about black people could we believe such outrageous claims. And as a demonstration of how much they are part of this culture, many black leaders and black victims of Katrina echoed these sentiments.
I would think the Black Congressional Caucus would do much better if they stopped worrying whether referring to people taking refuge from Hurricane Katrina as refugees signified that black people were not seen as part of this country, but rather started worrying about how much black America is part of this country, even internalizing the racism that permeates our culture.
Posted by zeynep at 12:08 AM | Comments (4)
September 13, 2005
Hurricane Katrina Finds its Own Lynndie England and Charles Graner
As usual, the guilty will be charged and tried if and only if they are small-scale operators:
The owners of a nursing home where 34 people were found dead after Hurricane Katrina have been arrested and charged with 34 counts of negligent homicide for not evacuating those patients, the Louisiana attorney general's office said on Tuesday.Mable Mangano and Salvador Mangano Sr. surrendered to Medicaid fraud investigators in Baton Rouge late Tuesday afternoon and were being held in a parish prison.
Well, take it from Charles Graner and Lynndie England. Small-timers get time. If you want to get away with murder, well, letting only 34 people under your care die won't do.
Posted by zeynep at 07:49 PM | Comments (0)
September 07, 2005
War on Hurricanes
Brilliant analysis of what our war on Hurricanes would look like, from Billmon:
Dead or AliveTime's Matt Cooper notes that Katrina was the anti-9/11 for George W. Bush in more ways than one:
But last week offered no New York bullhorn moment. He can't threaten to get Katrina "dead or alive."I guess Karl isn't returning Matt's phone calls any more.If you think about it, it's probably just as well that Katrina wasn't a terrorist. Because if she was, she'd probably still be hiding out in the North Atlantic, periodically smuggling out bombastic videotapes ("Death to puny mammals and their infidel cave hives!") and occasionally sending violent thunderstorms to blow down train stations and beach resorts outside the United States.
And then the Cheney administration would have to go find some other tropical storm -- somewhere in the Indian Ocean, probably -- to declare war on. And that would trigger a long, tedious debate about whether the Indian Ocean had anything to do with the flooding of New Orleans, or whether Cyclone Saddam (or whatever) was secretly storing up lighting bolts in the Bay of Bengal for a sneak attack that would electrocute millions of Americans in their sleep.
Then the neocons would have to cook up some phony intelligence reports showing that tornados spawned by Saddam and Katrina met secretly over the Prague Airport and plotted to blow away Biloxi. And Condi Rice would have to go before the UN Security Council and recite a CIA fantasy script about the Indian Ocean's secret thunderbolts of death, and the chemical weapons trailers hidden in the eye of Cyclone Saddam.
Then Dick Cheney would have to go on Meet the Press and promise Tim Russert that Operation Cyclone Liberation would be a piece of cake, because the waves in the Indian Ocean would greet us as liberators, allowing our troops to walk on water. And then we'd have to have another big argument about how many meterologists it would take to occupy a cyclone, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would say 500,000 and the neocons would say 5 -- until Bush fired the head of NOAA and give his job to an intern from the American Enterprise Institute.
Then the boys at the National Security Council would have to draft a whole new national security strategy, claiming an exclusive U.S. right to preemptively invade any ocean that might conceivably produce a Category 3 or above hurricane, and convert it into a peaceful, ripple-free lake of democratic capitalism.
Then Joe Biden, Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton would have to line up and explain that they, too, are in favor of invading every ocean in the world -- but only if Bush agrees to quadruple the size of the U.S. Navy and equip every Marine with an armored aqualung. And Tom Friedman would have to write a column for the New York Times arguing that it is both possible and desirable to create peaceful, pro-Western cyclones that will accept Israel's right to exist, because the oceans are flat.
But worst of all, we'd have to listen to Shrub strut and shout about how he's going to "smoke Katrina out of her seahole," and "bring the evildoer to justice" -- only to turn around a few months later and explain that he isn't really concerned about hurricanes any more, now that the entire U.S. miltary is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Then John Kerry would make a big stink about how the administration is ignoring the real weather war, and Bush would get all pissy and defensive the way he does, and deny he ever said any such thing.
Then Kerry would get pissy and demand that Bush dump even more troops into the Indian Ocean, and Bush would get even more defensive, and babble some feeble lie about how he relies on his generals to tell him how many troops they need to dump into the Indian Ocean in order to make sure we fight the cyclones there instead of in New Orleans. And then media would bend itself over backwards pretending that Shrub actually has a freaking clue about what's going on outside his own head.
We've already been through that kind of insanity once, and I don't think anyone -- least of all Bush -- wants to go through it again. So I guess we should be relieved that Katrina was just a storm. Hurricanes we can deal with, sort of. But a Global War Against Hurricanes (or, alternatively, a Struggle Against Weather Extremism) could easily be our national undoing.
Posted by zeynep at 07:28 AM | Comments (1)
September 05, 2005
People Still Trapped
There is so much to say about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Still, I thought I'd point out something. There are still people trapped, unrescued, dying. Yes the Superdome and the Convention center have been evacuated, so the most striking media images are gone, but there are who-knows-how-many people trapped in attics, upper floors and roofs.
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- Time is running out for thousands of people awaiting rescue six days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, rescuers say.Officials say they do not have the manpower, the resources or enough time to save everyone.
"My guys are coming back and telling me, 'Sir, I went into a house, and there are three elderly people in their beds, and they're gasping, and they're dying,' " Coast Guard Capt. Bruce Jones said.
"And we got calls today, 'We need you ... to go to a place in St. Bernard Parish. It's a hospice, ... and there are 10 dead and there are 10 dying.' But those people were probably alive yesterday or the day before."
How can there still not be enough resources to airlift everyone out of there? It's been a whole week. Seven days.
Posted by zeynep at 12:29 PM | Comments (1)
September 01, 2005
Insurance Fraud on My Mind
Tens of thousands of people have been abandoned, in the face of predictable situation, packed into a superstadium without enough water or food, without sanitation, and worst of all, without the kind of organization that is necessary to keep tens of thousands of people at least safe, if not comfortable.
And what does President Bush warn us about? Insurance fraud. Yes, insurance fraud. And gas prices.
The president urged a crackdown on the lawlessness."I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this — whether it be looting, or price gouging at the gasoline pump, or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud," Bush said. "And I've made that clear to our attorney general. The citizens ought to be working together."
I am so appalled by the conditions down there, it's hard to express. Why wasn't water and food airlifted as soon as Hurricane Katrina moved on? Isn't there anyone in FEMA who has thought for a minute about what happens if tens of thousands of people are placed for days into a structure built to house them for a few hours? How can there not be enough water stacked beforehand? Why aren't there portable toilets by the hundreds, which are quite easy to set up? Why aren't hundreds of doctors and nurses housed with these people?
How can the richest country on earth be unable to take care of a few cities in trouble -- one that was predicted days in advance? And how can insurance fraud really be what moves our president to words at this point in time?
It's almost as if our foreign policy has been turned inward.
Posted by zeynep at 09:11 PM | Comments (0)
June 20, 2005
I Regret I was Harmed
Does this sound like an apology to you? All I hear is "I regret I made a choice that has turned out to be embarassing to me."
Sen. Robert C. Byrd's new memoir reveals both his encyclopedic knowledge of political history and the unlikely inspiration that helped launch his own political career: A Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan."It has emerged throughout my life to haunt and embarrass me, and has taught me in a very graphic way what one major mistake can do to one's life, career and reputation," the West Virginia Democrat says in an autobiography being released Monday. "I displayed very bad judgment, due to immaturity and a lack of seasoned reasoning."
...
Byrd says he never resented blacks, Catholics or Jews, but he failed to "examine the full meaning and impact of the ugly prejudice behind the positive, pro-American veneer."
"My only explanation for the entire episode is that I was sorely afflicted with tunnel vision — a jejune and immature outlook — seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions."
Here's another excerpt from another piece on Byrd's newly-published memoirs:
In the early 1940s, a politically ambitious butcher from West Virginia named Bob Byrd recruited 150 of his friends and associates to form a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. After Byrd had collected the $10 joining fee and $3 charge for a robe and hood from every applicant, the "Grand Dragon" for the mid-Atlantic states came down to tiny Crab Orchard, W.Va., to officially organize the chapter....
"It has emerged throughout my life to haunt and embarrass me and has taught me in a very graphic way what one major mistake can do to one's life, career, and reputation," Byrd wrote in a new memoir -- "Robert C. Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields" -- that will be published tomorrow by West Virginia University Press.
...
Byrd said in an interview last week that he never intended for his book to provide "finite details" of his Klan activities, but to show young people that there are serious consequences to one's choices and that "you can rise above your past."
But the only consequences Sen. Bryd seems to be concerned are the consequences for him.
Uncoincidentally, as the Post piece points out, he downplays his later racist activities, including his much later efforts against the integration of the military forces where he wrote that he would never fight in the armed forces "with a Negro by my side," and that "Rather I should die a thousand times, and see old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels." He also filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and voted against Thurgood Marshall.
All this is not to say a man should not be allowed to move on from having succumbed to the dominant ideology of his era. However, there is a difference between a sincere apology and a cover-up. Sen. Bryd standard line, which he repeated last week, saying that "I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times." would ring a lot more true if he started showing concern for the consequences of his actions on others, not just on him. Maybe then he could also stop downplaying the truth of the extent of his activities because he would then be confronting his past, rather than running from it.
Posted by zeynep at 07:40 AM | Comments (0)
March 28, 2005
Oh, That School Shooting.
Well, right on cue, Bush reads into the microphone about the second-deadliest school shooting since Columbine:
President Bush broke his public silence on Saturday about the deadliest U.S. school shooting in six years, touting the government's response "at this tragic time" after some American Indian leaders complained he paid little attention to the rampage.Bush's delayed public reaction to the shooting stood in contrast to his swift and high-profile intervention earlier this week to try to prolong the life of Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman in Florida whose feeding tube was removed.
...
Bellecourt cited Bush's decision to break off his Texas vacation to sign emergency legislation on Monday that permitted federal courts to consider appeals by Schiavo's parents to force the reconnection of the feeding tube.
"He does not have any problems flying in to restore the feeding tube to Terri Schiavo. I'm sure if this happened in some school in Texas and a bunch of white kids were shot down, he would have been there too," Bellecourt said.
Let me also predict that, given the widespread criticism of the incredibly callous initial response to the December tsunami, the U.S. will make a large pledge for the today's earthquake off of Sumatra, even if this one does not cause a tsunami, or anywhere near the damage of the first one. (Which I'm all for, as long as it is not simply a shifting of money from one set of victims to another. And while I'm really disgusted by the current hierarchy of victims, with sub-Saharan Africans being treated as the least-worthy, it does not make any of the "higher-valued" victims any less victims.)
Posted by zeynep at 07:57 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 25, 2005
Second-Deadliest School Shooting? Who Cares?
Did you notice the that the second-deadliest school shooting since Columbine took place last week? Maybe you heard a bit about it, but the coverage disappeared very quickly. Remember the wall-to-wall coverage after the Columbine shooting? On the surface, there is all the elements of the kind of story that would be endlessly discussed. The shooter might have been a Nazi sympathizer. On his website, he posted pictures of the band Nirvana -- the founder Kurt Cobain committed suicide. His blog certainly expressed his troubled soul:
"16 years of accumulated rage suppressed by nothing more than brief glimpses of hope, which have all but faded to black," he wrote in an undated personal biography on one Web site. "I can feel the urges within slipping through the cracks, the leash I can no longer hold…."In the same bio, he listed his occupation as "doormat," and said he was located in "endless scrutiny, Minnesota, United States."
There is even a hero in the story, a guard who refused to run even though he had the opportunity, and caused enough commotion allowing many students to get away. He was killed. So, why aren't we hearing more of this?
Many Native Americans are also wondering about the silence of the administration:
Native Americans across the country -- including tribal leaders, academics and rank-and-file tribe members -- voiced anger and frustration Thursday that President Bush has responded to the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history with silence.Three days after 16-year-old Jeff Weise killed nine members of his Red Lake tribe before taking his own life, grief-stricken American Indians complained that the White House has offered little in the way of sympathy for the tribe situated in the uppermost region of Minnesota.
And the obvious point:
The reaction to Bush's silence was particularly bitter given his high-profile, late-night intervention on behalf of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman caught in a legal battle over whether her feeding tube should be reinserted."The fact that Bush preempted his vacation to say something about Ms. Schiavo and here you have 10 native people gunned down and he can't take time to speak is very telling," said David Wilkins, interim chairman of the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and a member of the North Carolina-based Lumbee tribe.
Of course, we will soon see a well-choreographed public appearance by the president during which he will read touching words from the tele-prompter.
Posted by zeynep at 02:18 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
February 21, 2005
Do We Need to Continue Affirmative Action for Older, White Racists?
Today is the 40th anniversary of gunning down of Malcolm X, or Malik El-Shabazz as he chose to be known later in life. Much can be said about his enormous legacy, but one thing is certain. He does not need "affirmative action" to qualify for the Nebraska Hall of Fame.
"Malcolm Little" was born in Nebraska 80 years ago, and he remains one of the most important historical figures of the 20th century worldwide, let alone Nebraska-wide. Yet, last year, the Nebraska Hall of Fame voted to induct Sen. Kenneth Wherry, instead of Malcolm X, into the Hall.
Who is Kenneth Wherry, non-history buffs will ask. He is a former senator and Rebublican whip who "sold cars, pianos, and livestock, and was a licensed undertaker before entering Republican politics in Nebraska in the 1920s." One of his most notable claims to fame is that he was very active in the witch-hunt against homosexuals during the Mcarthy era, at one point declaring, in an interview with the New York Post in December 1950, that: "You can't hardly separate homosexuals from subversives. . . . Mind you, I don't say that every homosexual is a subversive, and I don't say every subversive is a homosexual. But [people] of low morality are a menace in the government, whatever [they are], and they are all tied up together."
By May of 1950, Senator Wherry quoted reliable police sources that 3,750 homosexuals held federal jobs. A month later, the Senate authorized an official investigation, the first of its type in the history of the United States. The results of the "pervert inquiry," as it was popularly named, came out in December at a time of profound concern over national security.The Senate Report accused the Truman administration of indifference toward the danger represented by homosexuals in governmental positions. The Report explicitly mentioned "lack of emotional stability" and "weakness of . . . moral fiber" as defining characteristics of homosexuals that made them likely targets of Soviet propaganda and recruitment.
So, Nebraska Hall of Fame committee chooses this examplary man over Malcolm X, who would have been the first African-American inductee. Unfortunately for them, they held the vote in secret and the Attorney General of Nebraska says they have to vote again since they are legally obliged to have an open vote. Along with some shenanigans to increase the number of years an proposed inductee must be dead to 50 years, and thus exclude Malcolm X, there is a counter bill in the statehouse suggesting that "the governor consider 'gender and ethnic diversity and the person's appreciation for the history and culture of the state' when choosing appointments to the Hall of Fame Commission. A state senator explains the issue:
“When you consider the makeup of the people on the commission — older white people — the likelihood is not the greatest,” said state Sen. Ernie Chambers of the chances for Malcolm’s inclusion.
In other words, one has to propose laws that look like affirmative action in order to have a composition that would not be so boneheaded. But the reality is that it has been affirmative action of the other kind, the kind that perpetuates unqualified, conservative white people in power, that has led to a commission so blinded by their racism that they are unable to evaluate historical merit using any reasonable standards of evidence. I mean, really. What on earth are those people doing on that committee? What does it say about Nebraska's establishment that a bill is introduced with the implied suggestion that one has to be African-American or some other minority to appreciate Malcolm X's historical importance? Are there really no white people qualified at that minimum level of historical grasp? If that is indeed the case, perhaps we do indeed need to continue affirmative action for white people until further education and enlightenment can bring down the blinders of racism. Where would they be without it?
Posted by zeynep at 02:24 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 19, 2004
"So you lied?" "I said it."
[Hello all. Justin here. Zeynep has already introduced me so I will just launch into today's blogging rant. Please do grill me though, since one of the coolest things about Zeynep - and Rahul - is their willingness to entertain all kinds of left heresies. In addition to being an 'ever-globalist' I am a radical, interested in social movements, but I don't think social movements can grow or succeed unless we are willing to be brutally honest, starting with ourselves. So brutal honesty is most welcome in the comments section. See you there.]
Tom Hurndall is one of the two activists from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) who, like several thousand Palestinians since 2000, was murdered by the Israeli army.
The hearings on his death have been telling. Because I'm still reading Anthony Hall's 'American Empire and the Fourth World', I can't help but think that they showcase the nature of warfare by colonists against indigenous peoples and the whole nature of American-style warfare, warfare in which internationals like Tom Hurndall and Rachel Corrie became 'collateral damage': killing them was not the intent of the Israeli army, it was just irrelevant.
This is shown by the dialogue recorded in the trial of Idier Wahid Taysir, the Sargeant who is being tried for manslaughter. Taysir told the court the following:
"I told him that I did what I'm supposed to; anyone who enters a firing
zone must be taken out. [The commander] always says this".
The story, reported in the Guardian, continues:
Sgt Taysir told the army investigators he had opened fire at Mr Hurndall because the Briton was on the edge of the security zone, carrying a weapon and wearing camouflage clothing.
In fact, he had not entered the closed zone, had no gun and was wearing a bright orange jacket.
The prosecutor asked the sergeant if Mr Hurndall had a weapon.
Sgt Taysir replied: "No. That's the truth."
"So you gave a false report to the company commander?" the prosecutor
asked.
"I did not give a false report. He might have had a weapon under his
clothing. People fire freely there. The [Israeli army] fires freely in Rafah."
The prosecutor continued: "But you told him that you saw a weapon?"
"Right."
"So you lied?"
"I said it."
The prosecutor then asked: "After that, you also reported that the man fired in the air and at you, right? Why did you report that he fired at you?"
The sergeant replied: "Because I had already fired without getting
approval [from the company commander]. Everything was under pressure and a result of fear. They tell us all the time to fire; that there is approval. All the troops [in Rafah] fire without approval at anyone who crosses a red line."
There are a number of things to be drawn from all this, lessons about the nature of military organizations and their ethic of secrecy, for example, and its incompatibility with democracy. But instead I want to just draw your attention to the nature of standing Israeli military orders in Rafah. In Taysir's words: "I did what I'm supposed to; anyone who enters a firing zone must be taken out." The phrase from the Vietnam War internal documents that that Chomsky has cited recently is "anything that flies against anything that moves." There's also the quote by Powell about how the US declared open season on MAMs (military-age-males) in Vietnam. The US has declared open season on MAMs (marriage-aged-males) in Iraq. In Fallujah, they first refused to let people out, and then proceeded to treat everyone who didn't leave as a military target.
I don't like the loose use of the term 'genocide', but this is a genocidal method of warfare. What other descriptor is appropriate for these 'free-fire zones'? The result of this kind of warfare, developed above all in the Americas and especially the US, was the genocide of the indigenous peoples (t)here.
Hitler himself modeled his East European campaigns on the US genocide of the indigenous peoples, as Ward Churchill documents in the book linked above. So long as 'free-fire zones' persist anywhere in the world, we won't be able to say that horrific chapter of human history is closed.
Posted by justin at 03:10 PM | Comments (3)
November 29, 2004
Onward, Moral Values
We're not necessarily segregationists. We just don't want to do anything about underfunded public schools, really.
That's the great argument from the opponents of the ballot measure that would "erase segregation-era wording requiring separate schools for 'white and colored children' and to eliminate references to the poll taxes once imposed to disenfranchise blacks.
Opponents claim that part of the amendment could lead to higher property taxes by letting courts declare that education is a constitutional right and then order spending increases for underfunded public schools.
Underfunded public schools. Anybody want to venture a guess about racial and ethnic breakdown of those?
The measure was defeated so the racist language remains on the books.
A lot of papers reporting the story used headlines such as "Alabama Vote Opens Old Racial Wounds". Don't these people they read their own stories before coming up with a title? How is a wound old, and presumably closed, when, more than 41 years after George Wallace blocked the doors of the Foster Auditorium to prevent Vivian Malone and James Hood from enrolling in the University of Alabama, the majority of the voters in the state are not willing to strike language from their state constitution about keeping apart "white and colored children"?
"Posted by zeynep at 12:43 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
August 01, 2001
AIDS, Africa and Selective Vision
In a July 11th article, the British weekly The Economist recounts the latest grim statistics on AIDS, noting emphatically that the 9,000 people who die each day from AIDS represents three times the number killed in the World Trade Center attacks. "If all men are created equal, all avoidable deaths should be regarded as equally sad," says the editorial, adding that "common decency suggests that the rich world should do whatever it can to help." The editorial concludes ominously: "Cynics in the West might write Africa off. Are China, India, Indonesia and Russia to be written off as well?"
Translation?
Africans are poor and black. Thus we (the Economist) realize, dear reader, your greed for profits is not whetted by viewing them as consumers. Nor is your compassion stirred sufficiently by viewing them as fellow human beings. However, be mindful that the fire that has scorched that continent is spreading and is now threatening places populated by people who are prosperous enough -- barely, but still above the threshold -- to count as potential consumers and pale enough -- barely, but still above the threshold -- to awaken your caring.
Two daring moves in a world with a cold heart: the bold assertion that all life should be valued equally and the implicit recognition that it is not.
The Economist was responding to the AIDS Conference in Barcelona, held in July 2002, which witnessed protests targeting both the U.S. government and "big Pharma." The substantial influence wielded by the
deep pockets of big Pharma, a fear of setting a precedent that human rights might trump intellectual private property rights, and callous indifference to poor, especially African, life have combined to lead both the Clinton and Bush administrations to attempt to block every reasonable effort by poor countries to obtain generic drugs.
The international disdain for U.S. policy has grown so great that not only was Secretary of Health Thompson booed by protestors the audience gave the protestors a standing ovation -- an occurrence made all the more remarkable when one considers that those attending
the session were not people from the slums of Soweto or landless Brazilian peasants but included largely government officials and representatives of the elite. While thousands of officials from governments and NGOs, scientists and activists flocked to Barcelona, CNN duly reported a notable absence : "Zackie Achmat, of South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign, was too ill to attend the conference but, in a video address, he said that despite price cuts the drugs that have drastically reduced deaths from AIDS in wealthy countries were still too expensive for people in developing countries."
CNN neglected to mention the fact that Achmat is too ill to travel but because, putting his body on the line for his beliefs, the HIV positive Achmat refuses to take anti-retroviral medicines until they are available to all South African HIV/AIDS patients through the public health system.
Achmat's not hard to reach -- I dug up his home phone number in about 10 minutes. Though I knew better than to ask about his sacrifice or ask too much about his ailing health -- he would simply point out that he was replicating the experience of millions of poor, mostly black or otherwise not-white people on his continent -- I asked anyway, and he said just that. The most personal he got was saying that it was a decision of conscience and that he remains quite comfortable with it.
In the movie version of John Grisham's novel, "A Time to Kill," a young white attorney from the "deep South", Jake Brigance, defends a black man, Carl Lee, who killed the two white men who raped and left his daughter for dead. Carl Lee turns down the hot-shot NAACP attorney, deciding to go instead with Jake. He explains that he needs a white attorney if he is to have a chance to connect with the jury: "See Jake, you think just like them. That's why I picked you. ... When you look at me, you don't see a man, you see a black man." In his closing arguments, an inspired Jake asks the jury to close their eyes and to imagine a little girl, raped, beaten, mutilated and left for dead. The jury is visibly moved, some are openly crying. Then, very deliberately, Jake asks them to imagine that she is white.
Eyes pop open, as the jury members are jolted by the awareness that, even while they thought they had reached the depth of the horror they could feel, in fact they had held back. The people in the jury box, as well as the people in the courtroom, come to the painful recognition that they still had an extra reserve of horror for a white little girl.
Yes, that's fiction. But Jahi Turner and Alexis Patterson are not. Alexis, 7, disappeared on May 3rd and Jahi, 2, on March 25th of this year. To this day, Alexis has been mentioned only six times outside the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and those were all after June 19th, when Elizabeth Smart's abduction in Utah made national headlines. One of the mentions is in a paper in Singapore and five out of the six are more about the disparities in the coverage between Elizabeth and Alexis -- she still functions and appears to us primarily as a black child rather than a missing child. (Oh, did I forget to mention that both Alexis and Jahi are black? And unless you never watch TV or read any newspapers, you already know what Elizabeth looks like.) Similarly, Jahi, who disappeared from a playground in San Diego barely makes the national news, garnering very few mentions outside of California papers.
The disparity in the resources is strikingly clear from even a cursory glimpse of the web pages dedicated to the equally tragic, equally heartbreaking cases. Elizabeth's page lists two toll-free tip hotline numbers, one toll-free information number, one toll-free fax number, one toll-free number for the search center and one toll-free number for the tips. Alexis' page, hosted on a freeserver with a pop-up ad, urges you to call the Milwaukee police department while Jahi's page directs you to the San Diego Police Department. Only Elizabeth's family has managed to garner the resources to offer a reward -- $250,000. Alexis' page doesn't mention a reward, and the only offer on Jahi's page is a gesture to their common tragedy with a prominent link to Elizabeth's page.
In his statement to the Barcelona Conference, Zackie Achmat said in plain black and white terms: "Just because we are poor, just because we are black, just because we live far from you, does not mean that our lives should be valued any less." He appealed once again, as activists have been doing for years now, for pharmaceutical companies and the rich governments to stop blocking poor countries from producing cheap drugs. The rich world hasn't just been miserly and callous, watching a tragedy unfold; we've been blocking efforts by the governments of those poor countries and by popular movements to alleviate the situation. The editorial in the Economist exhorts poor countries to emulate Brazil , "which has made good use of the fact that anti-AIDS drugs can now be bought fairly cheaply outside the rich world, thanks to a liberal interpretation of international treaties on patent law (and also to decent behaviour on the part of many drug companies)."
That "decent behavior," or more accurately behavior that is slightly less egregious than normal for Big Pharma, came only after a sustained and often militant campaign by activists around the world -- and it was only last year that the U.S. dropped its complaint with the WTO against Brazil's insistence on producing its own cheap drugs to fight AIDS and Big Pharma dropped its lawsuit against generic drug imports in South Africa. These lawsuits and threats contributed significantly to delaying the availability of AIDS drugs -- which means more deaths, more orphans, and, incidentally, bringing Zackie closer to death.
In a striking example of selective attention of the media, the Dow Jones archival service, which includes the top 50 U.S. Newspapers, many major news publications as well as the the wires, returns 84 hits for the month of July for the word "Toumai" -- the name given to the seven million year old humanoid fossil skull that was recently found in East Rift Valley, Chad. Type in "Angola" and "famine", the keywords for another story from Africa that also broke mainly in July: 57 returns. There were 27 more newspaper stories about a skull than about widespread malnutrition and starvation so grave that Doctors Without Borders referred to it as the worst African crisis in the past decade.
Toumai means hope of life in the local Goran language, a hope that is fading for millions of children in many places around the world. They are barely clinging to a precarious existence while the rich world seems to tenaciously cling to selective blindness and selective compassion.
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