In his recent article “Africa in our Midst: Lessons from Katrina,” which runs in the Oct. 2005 issue of American Renaissance, Jared Taylor gives an account of horrifying and explicit details concerning the actions of thugs and criminals in New Orleans which severely frustrated, and often completely halted, relief efforts for several days following Hurricane Katrina.
The thugs and criminals happen to be black, which is not surprising since 67% of New Orleans population is black. On the other hand 1) nobody else has reported these outrages in the comprehensive manner Taylor has and 2) many black leaders like Jesse Jackson have used the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina as an indictment of white people.
Apparently fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights acts, when the very mayor in charge of government in New Orleans is a black man elected by its people, the only acceptable discussion of race in America is one that conforms to the dramas of half a century before. Even if black people suffer at the hands of black people, whitey must be somehow to blame.
Jared Taylor is a white nationalist who has clearly rejected a multi-racial society. At the end of his report, he draws racist conclusions that we here at Frontpagemag.com find repugnant. At the same time, we are appalled that no other journalist or commentator has had the courage or the integrity to describe these horrific events without which the picture of this disaster -- and the way we understand our responsibility as a nation -- is not and cannot be complete.
Today Frontpagemag.com has assembled a distinguished panel to discuss what happened and why someone like Jared Taylor is singled out to be the messenger, and what the events themselves and the silence that surrounds them tells us. Our guests today are:
Debra Dickerson, the author of the prize-winning memoir An American Story and of her recent book The End of Blackness. Educated at the University of Maryland, St. Mary’s University, and Harvard Law School, Ms. Dickerson has been both a senior editor and a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report and a columnist at Beliefnet.
Jennifer L. Hochschild, the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government at Harvard University, with a joint appointment in Afro-American studies and lectureships at the Kennedy School of Government and the Graduate School of Education. Her interests lie in the intersection of American politics and political philosophy, particularly with regard to racial and ethnic politics and educational and social policy. Her recent research focuses on the meaning of the American dream and how it is perceived by Americans of different races and classes.
Carol Swain, professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of the highly acclaimed Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress. Her most recent books include The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration and Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism. She calls herself a truth speaker on the difficult issues of our day.
and
Marc Cooper, a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine and L.A. Weekly, he is the author of the recent book, The Last Honest Place in America: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas. Cooper has had published articles, essays, and interviews in numerous publications over the past 30 years. He hosts "Radio Nation" on public radio and teaches journalism at USC's Annenberg School of Communication.
FP: Debra Dickerson, Carol Swain, Jennifer L. Hochschild and Marc Cooper, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.
Dr. Swain, let me begin with you.
What do these events (the rapes, killings, the posturing of the Mayor and Jackson and others) tell us? What does the silence of the press about these events tell us? What does the fact that someone like Taylor is the messenger tell us?
Swain: The violence in New Orleans reminds us of the words of Thomas Hobbes. Life in a state of nature, he argued, is poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The fact that conditions degenerated so quickly is a sign of the spiritual poverty of a small element within the black community. The violence is especially unfortunate because, when one person commits a heinous act against another person, the entire community suffers from the resulting stigma and shame. These horrid events highlight a critical need for people to be guided by moral and ethical principles such as those found in the Ten Commandments and in the Golden Rule with its admonition to treat others the way you want them to treat you. It is a spiritual poverty as much as a material poverty that explains the desperation of many black people and their failure to fully overcome the vestiges of the past.
Many people failed to exercise commonsense at the height of the crisis. There is plenty of blame to go around. Race relations, however, are worsened by the diatribes of black leaders hurling accusations of white racism while carefully avoiding any serious condemnation of the lawbreakers. The posturing of the Mayor and some of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus were unfortunate tactical errors that make all blacks seem morally deficient. It is high time for black political and religious leaders to make black crime reduction the number one priority for the black community. It is time for black leadership to stop making excuses for inexcusable behavior like rape, murder, and looting of non-survival goods.
Jared Taylor was not needed to raise the consciousness of the nation. At the height of the crisis, there were plenty of other media outlets focused on the lawlessness of blacks. What was captured on television screens, however, was the bad behavior of a criminal element that exists in every racial and ethnic group. Given the right set of conditions, even our most civilized Mr. Taylor could resort to heinous acts of violence against other human beings. As the prophet Jeremiah reminds us in 17:9, the human heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, who can know it? The name Katrina means purification. Without God in the world, or actively working in our lives, we are doomed.
FP: Thank you Professor Swain. In your next turn in the following round, could you kindly elaborate on your remarks about excusing inexcusable behavior and reflect for us not only on this syndrome in the black community but its reinforcement by liberal whites and then on the impact such low standards have on the black community itself?
Mr. Cooper?
Cooper: Let me start by noting the rather generous characterization our moderators have made of Jared Taylor. Mr. Taylor is not just a "white nationalist" but is, in fact, a rather blatant White Supremacist whose public work brims with affirmations that blacks are inferior.
I don't think that some consideration of this source itself is out of the question and I think it beyond sloppy to accept his narrative as is. Taylor's report is swollen with innuendo and starved for any sourcing or attribution. Just swallowing the word of someone who is basically a Klansman does not seem a very appetizing option.
"To be sure, the story of Hurricane Katrina does have a moral for anyone not deliberately blind. The races are different. Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization-any kind of civilization-disappears." This is what our hosts call "racist conclusions?" I think a more appropriate characterization would be that they are the feverish ravings of a full-on, right-wing moonbat, no?
I am sure, nevertheless, that some of the barbarities that Taylor describes are based on fact. I'm just as certain that he has inflated, exaggerated and skewed them to fit his blatantly racist world view.
Further, I don't understand why our friends at Frontpagemag claim to be appalled "that no other journalist or commentator had the courage" to describe these events as they were happening.. Indeed, I find NO original reporting in Mr. Taylor's rant whatsoever. A simple Nexis search reveals that all of the eyewitness quotes he offers were merely lifted from mainstream media sources i.e from stories that we had, in fact, already read or could have read. That would make Taylor more of a skilled copier than the messenger of any substantial observation. His only contribution, if you wish to call it that, was to re-assemble already existing reports in a way to most disfavorably portray blacks.
I, for one, certainly knew about similar outrages from other and much more reliable and mainstream journalists and commentators very early on. Indeed, on September 1, I wrote on my own blog that "gangs of looters" were roaming the city and noted that this said "something very ugly about our species." I learned of the looting and shooting from Reuters and AP among many other immediately available and far more legitimate news sources. Stories of rape and murder were also carried day after day by all of the major networks. What's new in Taylor's assemblage, other than unsourced superlatives?
In that same September 1 blog posting of mine, I also referred to a piece by Slate's Jack Shafer who took the media to task - at that early stage of the crisis-for downplaying the fact that not only most of the looters, but also most of the victims (as well as most of the population in New Orleans) were black. So, yes, early on the totality of the racial dimensions of this catastrophe were under-reported. Both in terms of victims and victimizers. I also think that Shafer's explanation for this early omission was quite insightful. No question that there is a squeamishness around race that pervades the mainstream media; a fear of being politically incorrect too often leads to a reluctance or - yes, a refusal-to report uncomfortable facts.
With hours and hours of air time to fill in its non-stop coverage, however, the media eventually did get around to reporting on race. And at this late juncture, I find it to be simply untrue that "someone like Taylor is the messenger" of these stories. Similar horrifying anecdotes have been reported in the last two weeks by myriad sources. I'm tempted to ask, instead, why has Frontpagemag chosen such a tainted figure around which to stage this debate?
I find little surprising or revealing by the events themselves. If I would extract one grand lesson from the incidents of violence, whatever their real scope, it would be that these prove that blacks are pretty much like everyone else in the world. Very thin lines separate all civilization from barbarism and it is a barrier easily violated and erased when the right mix of circumstances are presented. I hardly think that New Orleans African-Americans have invented or even improved upon the long-standing methods of civil disorder as have been practiced by every race on the globe at some time or another.
From the way these matters are posed to us from the moderator, I suppose there's at least the implicit question as to whether armed violence significantly impeded the relief effort. I would say only this: if such disorder was threatening to derail disaster management or was effectively impeding it, then so much more urgent would have been the deployment of sufficient security forces (National Guard and Army) - forces that did not appear for nearly five days after the deluge. Certainly, the United States Army should be able to effectively deal with some improvised urban marauders, no matter what their color.
FP: Well to be fair to us, Mr. Cooper, we did say in black and white (no pun intended) that Jared Taylor “draws racist conclusions that we find repugnant.” It is just an evasion to dismiss Taylor because of his racial views, since you yourself concede that his report, which documents the mistreatment of poor blacks at the hands of New Orleans black elite, is factual and based on reporting you yourself have read and whose veracity you yourself do not doubt.
Nonetheless we accept that even the most civilized writer for the Nation (and we regard you as just that) will try to tar us with the racist brush for having the temerity to raise such politically incorrect matters as the incompetence of the black administration of New Orleans its disregard for the safety of its citizens and the lawless outrages of some of its black citizens and the conversion of this civil atrocity into its opposite: white racism. This has been the cheap, vicious and unconscionable refrain of liberals and progressives writing for the Nation and other journalistic institutions. If blacks commit atrocities, even if these atrocities are against other blacks, the liberal world will give them a pass, and find a way to blame the entire calamity on whites. That is the issue.
Your claim that the details in Taylor’s report can be culled from various sources on the web and in the media misses the point entirely. It’s the picture -- the whole -- that is the issue. New Orleans is a city with a black majority run by blacks – with black mayors since 1978 – and leftwing blacks at that. It has a police force run by blacks that is famously corrupt and proved itself in this tragedy to be a national disgrace – without incurring a fraction of the criticism that George Bush did, when Bush had only a fraction of the responsibility for what happened. What other police force would have ten percent of its officers walk off the job in the midst of a crisis? What if the ten percent of New York’s police force had walked off the job in the middle of the 9/11 crisis? You think no one would have noticed? What other mayor would offer to send this same police force for a vacation in Las Vegas at taxpayer expense only five days into the disaster while people were still waiting to be rescued and dying if they were not? And what other mayor who did that would not be run out of town on a rail (figuratively) by the national press? Only a black mayor could get away with incompetence, arrogance, and heartlessness like this. And of course the fact that he is a leftist who blames the tragedy in New Orleans on the Iraq war doesn’t hurt.
If New Orleans were run by Trent Lott and its police chief were also white, what do you think you and the rest of the media would be writing about this tragedy? Are you afraid to blame the local Democrats – mainly black – who mainly responsible for the failure to deal with this hurricane. Are you outraged by the anti-white racism is streaming across the airwaves? Obviously not. It was left to a white racist Jared Taylor to point out these depressing truths – but they are truths, that’s the fact. (Jack Shafer’s Slate piece, to which you refer, does not speak to these issues, either in part or in whole.)
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? This is the issue we want you to deal with, along with the question of how it was possible not just for political demagogues like Howard Dean and Jesse Jackson but for the leftwing media generally -- from the New York Times to CommonDreams.org -- to spin this disaster into a crime committed by whites against blacks, and incite blacks to hate and fear the very people who are rescuing them and coming to their aid in this tragedy. Quite a feat.
Dickerson: Jared Taylor is no messenger of any kind and, having read his lunatic ravings, I only agreed to participate to denounce his acceptance into ‘decent’ intellectual society. Shame on Front Page. It should have held out for a worthy lightning rod, let alone citizen or even human being, to be the catalyst for this conversation. Taylor is simply a racist and white supremacist who likes to type. There is no original reportage there, nothing that the rest of us didn’t hear, read and see as Katrina unfolded, yet his article’s purported thrust was the mainstream media’s refusal to ‘tell the truth’ about blacks. Ann Coulter was no where near the Superdome; a whole bunch of liberals were and that’s how we know anything we know about Katrina and its aftermath. I’d have to do some rereading, but if there’s more than three attributed sources in there, I’ll loot a Wal Mart and send Mr. Taylor another rifle to add to the horde he’s no doubt tending for the day when whites come to their senses and…well….you know.
I was particularly struck by his fetishizing of the terror of the few whites’ ‘locked’ in the Superdome with all those feral blacks – it’s almost funny. Almost. Reminds me of the Mad TV spoof of the sorta senile elderly couple who think the EMTs they’ve accidentally called are home invaders there for rape and murder but especially rape. In their headlong terror – “it’s finally happened, just like we knew it would, Martha!” -- they claw their way out into the street and get smashed by a semi.
In the 80s, I took a white co-worker to a BBQ joint in a perfectly boring part of the black part of town for an utterly uneventful lunch. For days after, she and the other office whites (I was the only black) told what can only be described as ghost stories, about the few times they’d been the only white somewhere and how terrifying it had been. This went on for some time. They ooh’d and ahhh’d and nodded soberly at each other’s stories of how nothing happened when they were alone with blacks. Apparently, some whites believe that when and where they enter, all Negro attention, which can only be violent, is immediately upon them. That lunch could not have been more uneventful, but to her, it had been a trip to deepest, darkest Africa were the natives are as violent, inexplicable and remorseless as any gorilla.
I spent a minute or two recently trying to imagine those office mates in the Super Dome and how closely reality would gibe with their self-important grab of a center stage which existed only in their racist minds. Reading Taylor, and all the demands to ‘tell the truth’ about blacks, reminds me of the realization I came to a while back: this kind of thinking has less to do with an actual belief in black inferiority than with some whites’ need to feel special, desired, the center of all attention, the baseline against which all other groups must be measured. Think of it: with their family members suffering, dying all around them, defecating on the floor, scraping off their babies’ diapers and reapplying them, bartering for insulin and chocolate, what are blacks thinking about? White people. Man, blacks are stupid.
Here’s another fascinating thing about white supremacy: it makes its believers lose all common sense and understanding of human behavior. Taylor oozes contempt for the black who supposedly defecated where he stood in a line at the Superdome rather than…..what? Get out of line and wait another four hours for his daily ration of water? Go the nonfunctioning, completely overflowing toilets when the whole place was a toilet? What’s he really saying? ‘No white person would shit without dignity! Nevah!’ I have a four year old with asthma, a mother with severe hypertension. If that was a line for meds, what would I have done? Logic 101 just flies out the window when there’s an opportunity for whites like Taylor to elevate their race by inference.
I also like the bit of nonsense where a gaggle of whites (what are they names? Who knows, just believe it.) are escorted out of the Superdome by Guardsmen for their own sainted safety, all the dismissing ‘pc’ black complaints of special treatment for whites. See, they were only getting special treatment…cuz they’re special. Let’s not forget the soldier recently (and conveniently) back from Afghanistan. “At least those folks want to help themselves. These folks just want you to do everything for them.”
Why mobilize an entire nation of these folks have the capacity to care for themselves just now? Exactly what is it that a person who’s just survived a flood, a hurricane, and the loss of every thing which makes one a functional human being supposed to do for himself? Why, build hisself a log cabin wi’ nuthin’ but a Bowie Knife and a Bible, dad gum it! If there is one bit of Taylor’s thinking which proves what a lunatic racism has made him, it’s his belief that only a black person would try to commander a rescue helicopter with the words “Get my family out of here!” In a piece dishonest to its core, Taylor is so blinded by a white supremacy which can only be maintained by denigrating others, that he can’t even tell that he should have doctored that quote.
The irony is that works like Taylor’s are an equally pernicious kind of looting; when America is at its most vulnerable, weakened and in need of unity, when we most need to be able to depend upon, invest in and trust each other, he shoots us all in the back and steals our shoes.
FP: Welcome Ms. Dickerson, it is a pleasure to have you with us. Allow us to welcome you to our pages as one of the most astute commentators on race issues. But pardon us if we say that your answer evades, like Marc Cooper’s answer does, the difficult question we put to you for the easy and trivial task of putting Jared Taylor in his place.
Even on this score, we have a question. Would you describe, say, a Derek Bell for example, as “simply a racist and black supremacist who likes to type”? And would you join a discussion only to denounce him, as though his racism were not repugnant to the overwhelming majority of the population at large?
Both Bell and Taylor are intellectuals who comment on race issues from a racist point of view. But unlike Taylor who is marginalized in the culture, Bell is a cultural (and particularly a liberal) icon – a former Law School Dean at the University of Oregon, a former Law Professor at Harvard and currently a Law Professor at NYU, and in each of these positions an active racist and racial demagogue to whom people in respectable circles on the Left listen and pay respect.
What’s the difference here except that Bell is black? Isn’t this the same double standard that makes allowance for black incompetence and worse in the New Orleans catastrophe while searching for a white demon to blame?
You write: “I was particularly struck by [Taylor’s] fetishizing of the terror of the few whites’ ‘locked’ in the Superdome with all those feral blacks – it’s almost funny.” Would this be your reaction if the Superdome were filled with whites who intimidated a handful of blacks to the degree that they had to be escorted out by white security guards? And how can you compare the scene in the Superdome to a BBQ among office mates?
In your next answer, I hope you will help, along with the rest of the panel, to get
us back to the actual question we posed and that we wish to discuss -- which is not what any of you think of Jared Taylor (none of us here are going to disagree), but what you think about the politically correct reporting of this calamity and how the low standards of expectation for black officials like Ray Nagin and black leaders like Jesse Jackson and (another racist) Al Sharpton impact their communities.
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