Hochschild: I am not a Christian. But the human consequences of the devastation of New Orleans push me into Biblical quotations, ranging from Paul’s letter to the Galatians  -- "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" – to the old aphorism, “judge not, lest ye be judged.” Mr. Taylor could do with a lesson in old-fashioned charity.

But his essay on “Africa in Our Midst” calls for more than pious incantations, and my responses range from fury to deep concern about the situation he is calling our attention to. Some parts of the essay are simply despicable and don’t warrant discussion, starting with the title and including at least the last four paragraphs.  Other parts merely display execrable purple prose – “many victims will not be found for weeks or even months, rotted beyond recognition, their killers never found. Drowned or murdered, the bloated, stinking bodies that turn up by the hundreds will look much the same,” and more to that effect.  But some elements are important.

First, it is not yet clear how much gratuitous looting (electronics rather than food), violence, and rape actually occurred; sociologists who study disasters warn us that reports of mayhem are almost always highly exaggerated. And there are obvious political reasons for some people, ranging from the incompetent or fearful local police to the criminally negligent federal authorities, to exaggerate the number and activities of the bad guys. Further, any large city experiences rape, theft, and violence over the course of any given week, so the issue at hand is not criminality but what an academic might call excess criminality.  In short, we need to be careful not to overreact -- perhaps my friend was wrong when he opined (from the safety of a convention hotel far away) that what we were seeing was evidence of the failure of the European enlightenment.

Second, there is a very fine line, or perhaps the right metaphor is that of a slippery slope, between grabbing baby formula as it floats by, to entering a devastated grocery store to pick up baby formula from the floor, to breaking a grocery store window to get to the baby formula, to taking some other food from the floor on the way to the baby formula, to taking some things that are not strictly needed for survival on the way to the formula, to taking some things that are not strictly needed instead of the formula, to holding someone up at gunpoint to get the formula for one’s own starving baby, to holding someone up at gunpoint to take the rest of their food for one’s starving spouse or mother, to holding someone up at gunpoint to take the rest of what they looted or “found,” to...  And all of this in waist-deep water full of waste, with no evidence that anyone cares or even knows that you and your family have been left in the drowned city.  I have gone through this tendentious list in order to remind us of how small the steps are from what we would all justify to what most of us would condemn; can any of us be sure that we would stop at the “right” place on this slope under these conditions? 

Another distinction is essential – between looting and violence. Visible looting is a crime, but centuries of exploitation of the old, the sick, the poor and, yes, the non-white, is too.  White-collar crime is much less visible, except for the occasional Enron, but it arguably causes at least as much pain and damage to its victims as does stealing a television set.  I don’t condone looting (however it is distinguished from finding), but poor people who steal when abandoned by all those responsible for order are not as morally culpable as those who murder or rape.

My one point of agreement with Mr. Taylor is that rapists and shooters should be held to account, if at all possible in the chaos.  Christian exhortations for humility and sociologists’ warnings about terrible life circumstances notwithstanding, people who shoot at rescue helicopters should not be able to get away with it.  But neither should those entrusted with public safety, from Mayor Nagin to the police chief to FEMA head Mr. Brown to President Bush. Vastly more people died because of them than because of the people Mr. Taylor is writing about.

FP: Welcome to FrontPage Professor Hochschild, it is a pleasure to have you with us. Your points are well-taken, but now, as we enter the second round, we would like to direct you and the rest of the panel to the main question with which we started.

There were 50,000 people in New Orleans without vehicles (this from the U.S. Census) and therefore without their own means to escape. Then there was the famous parking lot with the rows of drowned school buses which were not used to evacuate those people. According to press reports these buses could have taken 12,000 people to safety per trip. There was ample warning five days before the storm hit. So it is not a stretch to conclude that if the Mayor of New Orleans and the New Orleans Police and perhaps the Governor of Louisiana had done their jobs, no citizen of New Orleans would have been trapped or died.

Evacuation is in the first instance the responsibility of local officials, and the Mayor in particular. As you know the federal government is barred from taking action in these situations until asked to do so by local officials who were slow, very slow to respond. Yet the din of blame in the first days and actually throughout this crisis has fallen heavily on least culpable parties -- George Bush and the hapless and unqualified head of FEMA, which is basically an assist agency.

Moreover, the Katrina calamity has been absurdly and destructively turned into a moral lesson about white racism – as though white people had some control over the hurricane’s path or are responsible for the fact that black citizens of New Orleans were not evacuated, which is not remotely near the truth. Why is white racism even an issue? The vast majority of resources coming to the aid of New Orleans black citizenry were white. New Orleans is a democracy in which black people are a majority and lo and behold have elected their own black mayors since 1978 including the present incompetent one. Even the federal troops who were mainly white and who came to the rescue were headed by a general who is black. So why are we talking about white racism at all? Shouldn’t we be celebrating these remarkable circumstances in 21^st Century America instead of the harking back to the bad old days of segregation which you would have be over forty to even remember? And shouldn’t the media and those black and liberal politicians – Howard Dean prominently among them -- who have indulged in this inflammatory racial nonsense be ashamed?

This is one of the key questions we would like all of our panelists to confront. Dr. Swain?

Swain: Although we are united in our condemnation of Jared Taylor, it is important to note that the New Century Foundation, an organization he heads, has recently published the second edition of a volume called The Color of Crime: Race, Crime, and Justice in America, where he uses FBI statistics to support his contentions that blacks are more criminal than other racial and ethnic groups.  In the past, Taylor’s data have been reanalyzed by researchers who have not quibbled with his numbers.  Indeed, his volume has been cited by mainstream media outlets.  Because of his ability to reach a wide intellectual audience, we need to take him seriously by addressing his arguments about the unacceptable levels of crime within the black community.

We make a mistake when we argue that an extreme level of poverty is a justification or an adequate explanation for the black crime rate.  Clearly, there are other parts of the world stricken with dire forms of poverty and injustice, where the locals have not used their lot in life to justify acts of violence against fellow human beings. Black political leadership must tackle the issue from within. Nothing is gained by attributing dysfunctional behaviors in the black community to the legacy of slavery or present day white racism.  Therefore, accusing George Bush and FEMA of racism because of the quality and timing of their response to Hurricane Katrina is misguided, especially since it has become clear that local officials were derelict in their duties by turning away other states’ offers of assistance and by not making timely evacuation plans.

The facts suggest that it was a combination of factors including opportunism, poverty, inept political leadership at all levels of government, and indifference on the part of power-brokers in Washington that contributed to the chaos and loss of lives that followed Katrina.  The diatribes of black leaders hurling accusations of white racism, while carefully avoiding any serious condemnation of the lawbreakers, were unfortunate because such predictable behavioral patterns merely serve to reinforce negative stereotypes about the group. Once the charges are leveled against white leadership, it becomes more difficult for black leaders to forge effective coalitions with them, even though coalitions are essential for the formation of more effective public policies.

Those of us who care deeply about the future of Black America should stop making excuses for unacceptable behavior.  We must establish mainstream community standards for codes of behavior and hold all violators accountable to a higher code of justice.  What we need is internal monitoring of the community, new norms of acceptable behavior, and swift justice meted out by community members.  Until we address internal dysfunction with rough justice, crime will continue to accelerate providing much fodder for enemies of the group. Unlike the other contributors, I have not expended much space attacking Jared Taylor or the constituency he represents.  Instead I close by repeating what I said in my comment in the first round. It is a spiritual, as much as a material, poverty that explains the patterns of violence and disregard for life and property so prevalent in many black communities.  Black people need to rediscover their spiritual roots and their once deeply held belief in a living God that holds people accountable to a moral code of behavior. All people need to be guided by moral codes and virtues such as those found in the Golden Rule.  Indeed, we have deep and lasting obligations to fellow human beings.

FP: Thank you Professor Swain for addressing the issue we have attempted to raise and doing with admirable good sense. Mr. Cooper?

Cooper: I start this second round by eagerly associating myself with the insightful remarks of Debra Dickerson. While I hold a genuine personal affection for FP's David Horowtiz and while I have always been convinced that – in spite of some of our sharp differences – he was and is absolutely sincere in his anti-racist convictions, all of my better instincts warned me that a verbal mud fight centered around a crank like Taylor would be of questionable value. I fear that is being proven so.

My friends at FP are claiming a desire to deflate what they see as the undue, unfair racializing of the Katrina catastrophe. To achieve this end they have chosen a declared white racist to lead their attack. But when we respondents have the temerity to point out that the 800lb elephant sitting in the middle of the living room is wearing a Klansman's hood, we are ruled out of order.

Please. That doesn't pass the giggle test. I have made no assertion that FP is racist. I have merely stated that Jared Taylor is a terribly tainted and self-interested source that cannot be taken seriously. Debra is absolutely correct in stating that FP has no need to stoop to such a low level and that your arguments would be much more compelling in the mouth of someone other than a believer in black genetic inferiority.

In that context, it's hardly an "evasion" to dismiss Taylor's report based on his racial views when the entire point of his rant is precisely to prove the inferiority of blacks in general and their alleged dysfunction­as a racial group ­in New Orleans.

And why do you insist that somehow the assemblage of scattered anecdotal material by a Klansman like Taylor is the "whole picture?"  How on earth did you reach that conclusion? The whole picture, maybe, if one's pre-conceived bias is that blacks are jungle animals and no evidence to the contrary is permissible. The folks at FP have been around the mechanics of journalism long enough to know that any semi-literate character can assemble whatever picture he or she wants by the selection and omission of facts that – in themselves ­may be true (though I'm hardly suggesting that Taylor's work is even up to the smudgy standards of modern journalism).

I don't know that New Orleans's black mayor has gotten away with anything yet. Maybe I run in different circles than the FP, but I think there's a generalized sense in the country, and the media, that both he and the Democratic Governor did a rather piss-poor job of things. I certainly think they did. Their only saving grace is that Mike Brown's FEMA out-pissed them. 

Yet, FP furiously continues to pummel a straw man – and a waterlogged one at that. The mainstream media has not portrayed the fiasco in  NOLA as a case of whites persecuting blacks (If it has, please provide the links).. Nor have they lionized the Mayor and his police force. So I find the entire premise of this discussion to be rather flimsy.

If on the other hand, you are alleging that partisan figures who you mention, like Howard Dean, have tried to politically manipulate the situation and in so doing have pandered on the race issue, well… I suppose you are right. That's what politicians do, I believe.

But this is hardly a monopoly practice of the Democrats or the Left. We can say that conservatives can be just as bold and brazen. Look no further than this page where the FP doesn't flinch from using a White Supremacist to make its own case about the racial aspects of Katrina? Imagine, if …say… Howard Dean had prefaced his remarks on NOLA by quoting Reverend Farrakhan, perhaps with an FP-like disclaimer that "while his conclusions are racist" he still makes some very valid points? Come on, guys! We'd have to have stage a national fund-raiser just to buy the FP staff the necessary dose of post-cardiac attack medicine!

Indeed, just what is the point that FP is so eager to make here? And what is so compelling about it that they would go to the extreme of quoting an avowed racial extremist to make that point? Presumably, it's to prove the following:

"How much of the suffering of poor black people in this country is at the hands of black politicians like Ray Nagin who know they can get away with murder because of the double standards of reporters like yourself?"

To the first half of that statement I would, mostly, yawn and say well, yes, certainly black politicians and black elites can be as feckless, corrupt, incompetent and exploitative as their white counterparts. And so? Your second assertion that I employ professional double standards that allows black politicians to "get way with murder" only manifests either FP's wilful ignorance or malice. I see no evidence for your slur, because you can't find any. No reporter on the Left has been tougher on black political icons like Jackson, Sharpton and  Mumia than yours truly. Shame on you for such a baseless assertion. I have repeatedly excoriated these men for racial demagogy and shameless hucksterism and I will continue to do so without flinching. Does this column of mine sound like I'm an apologist for black administrations because they are black? An excerpt criticizes both the Bush administration and the anti-war left for being unwilling to use force to stop the murder of Africans by African regimes:

"Not that Bush is going to take any risks for Darfur. The peace movement need not fret. No American combat troops will be sent in to tamp down the murderous gangs carrying out the slaughter. Not a single American soldier will die to stop the killing. Nor will there be any marches demanding such an intervention. Instead, Bush says he's backing a too-small African force of barely 2,000 troops whose leaders, last week, complained they have yet to see much of the cash promised by Bush and the other powerful nations on Earth.

Nor is the 82nd or the 101st Airborne about to drop a few thousand paratroopers into the Zimbabwean capital of Harare to expedite megalomaniacal dictator Robert Mugabe's much needed passage into the next world. We sit immobile as more than a million of the poorest people in the world are being forced at gunpoint from their shacks and even from their subsistence gardens by a regime literally gone berserk. And, again, there will be no pressure from the American right or left to do anything except watch --if that."

I don't mean to be so self-serving. But it is you, dear FP friends, that have made reporters like me and the rest of the "left-wing media" the issue here so I have no choice except to respond.

Finally, I don't share Ms. Swain's religious beliefs nor do I care much to focus worldly events through a biblical prism. She suggests that blacks should become better, more spiritual, more responsible human beings. But why only blacks?  I much prefer the more universal and more thoughtful notion expressed in her following sentences:

"All people need to be guided by moral codes and virtues such as those found in the Golden Rule.  Indeed, we have deep and lasting obligations to fellow human beings."

Agreed.

FP: Thanks Mr. Cooper. I am afraid you are still to answer our question.

Yes, Jared Taylor is a racist. We get your point. I think we got it after the first 20 times you said it. We said so ourselves when we introduced the symposium. 

The issue is, Mr. Cooper, again: is Taylor any more racist than any multicultural separatist or “nationalist”? Do you write about racists like Derrick Bell, bell hooks, Spike Lee, Al Sharpton, Michael Eric Dyson in the same critical way that you write about Taylor? If you call Taylor a Klansman, then what do you call those individuals? And do you describe your own venue, The Nation, as shameful for printing them and the writings of dozens of other racists (which is more than we’ve done here)?

If this is not a double standard, what is? As for Ray Nagin, re-read what we wrote. Maybe we can put it more bluntly to avoid any ambiguity: every citizen of New Orleans who did not own a vehicle or could not move themselves out of New Orleans and who died, and most of these people were probably black, are on Ray Nagin’s account. He and he alone is responsible for what happened to them.

Mr. Cooper, we appreciate your respect and return it but we are much dismayed by your inability to see past Jared Taylor and to effectively deal with the issues we have asked you to discuss.

Finally, we suggest that perhaps you re-read what Carole Swain wrote. And think about it.

It is Debra Dickerson’s turn in this second round, but unfortunately her schedule became very hectic and she regrets she could not find the time to continue. Ms. Dickerson, thank you kindly for joining us in the first round. It is always a privilege to be graced by your presence and we hope to see you again soon.

Dr. Hochschild, let’s move on to you. Feel free to take the conversation in the direction you feel most significant, but kindly touch on my earlier questions -- especially on how the media and many black and liberal politicians have indulged in divisive and inflammatory rhetoric about Katrina, painting it as some kind of moral lesson about white racism. What do you think of the Black leaders such as Jackson and Sharpton who are exploiting this tragedy to spin their racial politics?

Hochschild: I actually don’t think it’s very productive, or even interesting, to argue over Jared Taylor and what he did or didn’t say that was redundant, wrong, vicious, truthful, or illuminating.  He’s not very important.  The central issue is what Katrina revealed, and what our nation is going to do about it.  But I have been asked to comment on “how the media and many black and liberal politicians have indulged in divisive and inflammatory rhetoric...” and on “Black leaders... exploiting this tragedy to spin their racial politics.”

I have several responses, which may contradict one another.  First, as Marc Cooper put it, of course politicians, activists, media commentators, and culpable officials are going to blame each other. Of course they will invoke external forces over which no one can expect them to have any control, and seek to apply old and cherished policy remedies to new and unprecedented circumstances. Of course blacks will blame whites, whites will point to their fear of enraged black mobs, and nuanced voices will mostly be drowned out.  I’m shocked, shocked to discover gambling in the back room! One hopes, in addition, that this isn’t all that these actors do – somewhere along the line, they might actually generate some insights and useful interventions.  But to point out that political discourse among the most energized advocates is racialized and coarse is shooting fish in a barrel.

Second, loud talk is sometimes what one does when one lacks power to do anything else.  Black political activists insist on white racism; white political officials give no-bid contracts to their buddies that permit skirting of affirmative action regulations and that exempt contractors from paying prevailing wages to their workers. I’d rather be quietly handing out and raking in the billions than shouting into a microphone; presumably so would the shouters, but they don’t have that power.  I wish they would focus more on actual malfeasance and misfeasance than on global generalizations, but I wish more strongly that the malfeasance and misfeasance were stopped and punished.

Third, I concur with, I think, all three of the other commentators in this symposium that Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco were incompetent and timid, if not venal and blind.  One is black; both are Democrats.  So?  Whites and Republicans were also incompetent and timid, if not venal and blind.  What this shows us is what we’ve always known; elected officials are most responsive to the constituents who provide their resources and votes – which is to say, the downtown business developers, the upstate voters, and the most well-connected interests.  (That is not to say that any other political system is better, just that democratic politics are no panacea.)

Again, the central point is that the people left behind were there for reasons of structural bias deeply embedded in the American political, economic, and social systems. To evoke an old Marxist phrase, it is not coincidence that the people without cars or enough money to put gas in their car at the end of the month were deeply poor (that is a redundancy) – and disproportionately old or young or sick or black or some combination thereof.  What Katrina revealed was not only media and politicians’ self-indulgence and stupidity, but also how vast the gap is that Americans permit between, say, the best-off 80 percent and the worst-off quintile.  We – all of us with any political clout – have permitted income and wealth disparities to rise to the level of the Gilded Age, have permitted poverty to be strongly associated with race and geography and health, and have invoked well-off individuals’ right to ignore community interests until they need to be politely coaxed out of their French Quarter homes.  We ignore what is inconvenient to deal with, whether that be inadequate levees, ludicrous “arrangements” for disaster relief, the costs of pushing experts out of FEMA, the inability of nursing home residents to drive to safety, or generations of black poverty.   It is the structure and dynamics of permitted inequality, not the relative degrees of evil of a given looter or political official, that we should focus on. 

FP: Thank Prof. Hochschild. Unfortunately I fail to understand your main points. Are you saying that actual, provable, malicious and unfounded accusations of racism by blacks and Democrats against guiltless whites are less important than hypothetical malfeasance by white politicians because white politicians have power (and black ones like Ray Nagin don’t)?

Also, the people left behind were not left behind by structures. They were left behind by actual living and breathing human beings -- human beings like Ray Nagin. He didn’t get them out and it was his responsibility to do so. Why can’t you and Marc Cooper face, let alone grasp, this issue? Could it be that perhaps you see the world only through structures and that the personal responsibility of individuals is a foreign (or perhaps threatening) concept to you?

In closing we would like to thank all of you for participating in this discussion and we hope you will all consider doing it again. Debra Dickerson, Carol Swain, Marc Cooper and Jennifer Dickerson, take care for now.