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Third trySubmitted by Prometheus 6 on September 5, 2005 - 9:39pm.
on Hurricane Katrina | Race and Identity Stupid errors on the keyboard made me lose two previous attempts to link this article. Maybe because it makes me angry. I could say some really ugly shit. Spreading the poison of bigotry BATON ROUGE, La. -- They locked down the entrance doors Thursday at the Baton Rouge hotel where I'm staying alongside hundreds of New Orleans residents driven from their homes by Hurricane Katrina. "Because of the riots," the hotel managers explained. Armed Gunmen from New Orleans were headed this way, they had heard. "It's the blacks," whispered one white woman in the elevator. "We always worried this would happen." Something else gave way last week besides the levees that had protected New Orleans from the waters surrounding it. The thin veneer of civility and practiced cordiality that in normal times masks the prejudices and bigotries held by many whites in this region of Deep South Louisiana was heavily battered as well. All it took to set the rumor mills in motion were the first TV pictures broadcast Tuesday showing some looters—many of them black—smashing store windows in downtown New Orleans. Reports later in the week of sporadic violence and shootings among the desperate throngs outside the Superdome clamoring to be rescued only added to the panic. By Thursday, local TV and radio stations in Baton Rouge—the only ones in the metro area still able to broadcast—were breezily passing along reports of cars being hijacked at gunpoint by New Orleans refugees, riots breaking out in the shelters set up in Baton Rouge to house the displaced, and guns and knives being seized. Scarcely any of it was true—the police, for example, confiscated a single knife from a refugee in one Baton Rouge shelter. There were no riots in Baton Rouge. There were no armed hordes. But all of it played directly into the darkest prejudices long held against the hundreds of thousands of impoverished blacks who live "down there," in New Orleans, that other world regarded by many white suburbanites—indeed, many people across the rest of the state—as a dangerous urban no-go area. Now the floods were pushing tens of thousands of those inner-city residents deep into Baton Rouge and beyond. The TV pictures showed vast throngs of black people who had been trapped in downtown New Orleans disgorging out of rescue trucks and helicopters to be ushered onto buses headed west on Interstate Highway 10. The nervousness among many of the white evacuees in my hotel was palpable. Few stopped to contemplate that the reason nearly all the people shown on TV were black was because that's who was left behind when the better-off New Orleans residents with the money and means to escape evacuated the city in advance of the storm. Nor did they seem to notice that most of the refugees were bedraggled mothers and exhausted fathers and frightened children and ailing old people—ordinary, law-abiding citizens who had had little to begin with and escaped with absolutely nothing except the clothes on their backs and their lives. And it wasn't just the uninformed, the idle and the bigoted spreading the poison with loaded language. Baton Rouge Mayor-President Kip Holden, himself an African-American, blamed the state for sending "New Orleans thugs" to be sheltered in Baton Rouge and promptly slapped a dusk-to-dawn curfew on the main River Center shelter, which held 5,000 refugees from the storm. "We do not want to inherit the looting and all the other foolishness that went on in New Orleans," Holden was quoted as telling the Baton Rouge Advocate in Thursday's edition. "We do not want to inherit that breed that seeks to prey on other people." It was left to the Baton Rouge police chief to go on TV later in the day to try to cool the growing hysteria and point out that a single knife had been seized in the shelter. The mayor later said he had been misquoted by the newspaper. But the damage had been done. The doors to my hotel stayed locked.
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