New Orleans: Black Snakes & White Spiders

As a lifelong LA resident, I relied on the LA Times to get my news until 1982. I’d joined the LAPD in 1980, and it took me two years before I’d read my last fake anti-conservative anti-LAPD story. When it comes to conservatives, the Ahmanson Family uses the Times much the same way that Michael Moore uses the camera, fabricating or misrepresenting information when the facts aren’t ugly enough. I still don’t subscribe, but get it secondhand from another ex-liberal who does.

In a curious piece called Black Snakes, White Spiders, Leonce Gaiter perpetuates myths that led to the New Orleans debacle while blaming white racism for liberal incompetence to market a fiction novel.

Gaiter: I WAS FASCINATED to watch white reporters and commentators tip-toeing around the taboo word "black" in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath. Class, not race, they said, was the reason black people were wading in neck-high water with their belongings on their heads.

Ex-lib: If race was why blacks waded through neck-high water, to what can we assign the whites who waded through? That both waded through suggests class, not race.

Gaiter: Class, not race, they insisted, was why these black people had to live for days in their own feces and urine in a dank hotbox of a stadium — which is akin to insisting that your right leg carried you from point A to point B and ignoring the contribution of your left.

Ex-lib: Mayor Nagin invited blacks and whites to a stadium that was not prepared as per New Orleans Emergency Preparedness Plan. If the whites and blacks were the right leg, the local and state government was the left (no pun intended).

Gaiter: The reaction of whites toward blacks has been a lifelong study for me. Though black, I have spent 95% of my life around whites. White schools, white neighborhoods, white workplaces, white friends.

Ex-lib: An army brat, Gaiter was raised on military bases throughout the US and Europe.

Gaiter: I was raised during the '60s, and my New Orleans-bred parents insisted on living in the best neighborhoods with the best schools. They got out of the South to make that possible, and if a white Northern school or neighborhood was hostile, so be it. It was the price they, and I, would have to pay.

Ex-lib: Based upon Leonce’s blog and other information, I suspect he’s gay. Homosexuality is not relevant, unless one is writes about intolerance on a military base and blames it on racism. Numerous requests to Gaiter’s email account remain unanswered.

Gaiter: Some of you are ready to wag your finger in black America's face and say, "See! His family could do it. What's your excuse?" But my mother was a brilliant woman, and my father possessed a Herculean will that allowed him to escape a poor, fatherless family of 15 children in a racist dung-hole of a Louisiana town and make a comfortable, decidedly middle-class life for himself and his family in an aggressively hostile military…

Ex-lib: Was it racism that made the Army “aggressively hostile,” or Gaiter’s sexual orientation? That gays felt oppressed in the military during the 1960s and 1970s is not a surprise.

Gaiter: And he did it without currying white favor by betraying or abandoning the black men and women with whom he served.

Ex-lib: I suspect that Colin Powell and thousands of other black military leaders might question Gaiter's implication that blacks succeed in the military by catering to whites and abandoning or betraying other blacks.

Gaiter: Do you possess the brains and will to overcome so much and go so far? If not, put that finger away.

Ex-lib: Liberal condescension…

Gaiter: Being raised in a sometimes hostile white world has taught me that we are all racists. Our little post-monkey brains (evolutionarily speaking) are suspicious of that which is unlike us, and to such we are more likely to assign nefarious motives and intentions. A recent Science magazine article describes research suggesting that fear informs the attitudes between ethnic groups in part because negative associations stick more easily and relentlessly to faces that don't look like ours. When researchers paired faces with frightening images, white participants acquired more persistent conditioned fears in response to pictures of black faces than to pictures of white faces, and blacks did the same thing with white faces. This fear response leads to avoidance, which prevents us from knowing people who aren't like us and makes them a blank slate for projections that justify our fears.

Ex-lib: Gaiter cites this report that conditioned fears of things like snakes and spiders leads to avoidance, which is a similar response to persons not of the same race. While the study was intended to better understand intergroup violence, Gaiter misstates the evidence to suggest racism.

Gaiter: To me, this seems a simple recitation of the obvious. However, many Americans have a deep national investment in our myth of unassailable moral rectitude. Our history and founding myths insist on a superior sense of justice as our birthright, our national raison d'etre.

Ex-lib: Roughly one-third of our nation supported slavery in 1776. Had Congress not excluded Thomas Jefferson’s condemnation of slavery, America might not have secured the sovereignty necessary to end slavery in America and around the world.

Gaiter: Black Americans have more license to admit our wariness and mistrust of whites. Whites cannot admit their mistrust without summoning their forebears brutal enslavement of Africans.

Ex-lib: Like most Americans, my forebears fought to end slavery. I spent more than half of my life fighting injustice and racism. That I should feel guilty about slavery is like asking blacks to feel guilty about OJ Simpson. That some people use guilt to coerce whites into further monetary or social concessions (like affirmative action) is not surprising.

Gaiter: You can't feign moral rectitude as you simultaneously acknowledge the bestial inhumanity that lurks in our American history. Many Americans look at black men and women and see an unwelcome reminder. TVs filled with scenes of black despair call forth the holds of slave ships, and so we spend days pretending that we don't notice the race of those hungry, grieving, angry, exhausted people.

Ex-lib: More guilt…

Gaiter: A conservative tide has worked hard to strengthen the denial of our American crime — to convince Americans that our record of race hatred is either black Americans' fault or our hysterical imaginings. Some conservatives promote the idea of colorblindness, which is akin to eyelessness as a cure for urban blight. Suggesting that you can deny what is before your eyes — insisting that you have the will and power to ignore both it and its vast historical implications — is breathtaking hubris.

Ex-lib: Gaiter redefines hubris by blaming liberal municipal incompetence on conservative white racism. Since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Americans have spent more than a TRILLION dollars (twelve zeros), handed out free business loans and enforced decades of anti-white workplace and college quotas (that Gaiter used) to correct our past.

Gaiter: To many, blacks aren't so much citizens as threats to the majority's sense of self. In the wake of Katrina, a headline in the Economist blared "America's Shame," rubbing salt in our punctured sense of righteousness. Pundits insisted that race, not class, was the source of that shame. But history is a living thing. It didn't disappear in 1964. In New Orleans, in particular, race and class have been conjoined twins for centuries.

Ex-lib: Just as Arafat kept used propaganda and poverty to control Palestinians, liberal politicians (including many blacks) have carried out policies and rhetoric designed the keep their base intact – punctuated by others who exploit opportunities for personal gain (like struggling book sales).

Gaiter: The 9th Ward is flood- and poverty-prone — low-lying and low in the city's class structure. It's no coincidence that its people are among the city's blackest. This is where they were forced to live, and this is the only place many feel they have the right to live, anchored there by a "can't-have" hopelessness implanted in generations born to shackles.

Ex-lib: Katrina decimated black AND white neighborhoods in an area half the size of the United Kingdom. Gaiter ignores affected white areas because it undermines his argument.

Gaiter: White people see these people standing on rooftops, pleading for help, and attach all sorts of ugly associations. That's natural — but acceptable only if they recognize it as an expression of our inescapably flawed history and humanity. Own the shame, America. It is as much a part of you as your triumphs and glories. Own it, and you might take action.

Ex-lib: Beyond a trillion dollars and liberal policy, what action does he recommend? Maybe he'll tell us when he markets his next novel. ***

Other essays on New Orleans are here, here, and here. I also recommend this article.