Mon, 19 Dec 2005 02:41:02
Katrina killed without regard to race
As most rational people (who in this case happened to be on the right side of the aisle) have been saying since August 28th, the Katrina disaster didn’t have a damn thing to do with race or economic power.
The analysis contradicts what swiftly became conventional wisdom in the days after the storm hit — that it was the city’s poorest African American residents who bore the brunt of the hurricane. Slightly more than half of the bodies were found in the city’s poorer neighborhoods, with the remainder scattered throughout middle-class and even some richer districts.
“The fascinating thing is that it’s so spread out,” said Joachim Singelmann, director of the Louisiana Population Data Center at Louisiana State University. “It’s not just the Lower 9th Ward or New Orleans East, which everybody has heard about. It’s across the board, including some well-to-do neighborhoods.”
Because New Orleans was one of the nation’s poorest cities, where more than one in four residents lives below the poverty level, many of the victims were still found in neighborhoods that were impoverished by national standards. But by the standards of New Orleans, those neighborhoods were economically stable, and deaths citywide were distributed with only a slight bias for economic status.
Of the 828 bodies found in New Orleans after the storm, 300 were either recovered from medical facilities or shelters that offer no data on the victim’s socioeconomic status, or from locations that the state cannot fully identify. Of the 528 bodies recovered from identifiable addresses in city neighborhoods, 230 came from areas that had household incomes above the citywide median of $27,133. The poorer areas accounted for 298 bodies.
“A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on.” Maybe Winston Churchill said it, maybe he didn’t. The fact remains that it is a universal truth. The lies about Katrina will never be lived down in full, and we all know who is to blame for that sad fact. You don’t need me to list the politicians and the media outlets that started these lies in order to try to capitalize politically on the emotions of the average Joe who doesn’t have the time to track this stuff down online.
In the meantime, the best we can do is try to spread the truth as we learn it. Make sure you tell someone the next time NOLA comes up in conversation...the race allegations about Katrina were completely and utterly untrue.
Posted by JimK at 02:41 AM on December 19, 2005
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