[Marxism] more on the hunting of Blacks in New Orleans during Katrina

[Dbachmozart@xxxxxxx]

Empire Burlesque - Chris Floyd
 
_A  Correction and an Apology_ 
(http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/empire_burlesque/~3/sgcYNxJmwOo/1667-a-correction-and-an-apology.html)
   
Posted:  19 Dec 2008 02:18 AM PST
 
_In a brief post yesterday_ 
(mip://06018398/component/content/article/3/1666-notes-from-all-over.html) , I 
wrote that African-Americans were  treated as 
second-class citizens in the United States. I would now like to  apologize for 
making such a controversial -- and flagrantly incorrect --  statement. 
Obviously, I was letting my knee-jerk liberal PC prejudices run wild.  For as 
_a new  
article in The Nation_ (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090105/thompson)  
forcefully demonstrates, African-Americans are not treated as second-class 
citizens 
in the United States; they are treated as  wild animals to be hunted down and 
shot in cold blood.

The article is a  very detailed investigation of the white vigilante groups 
that formed, with  police approval, in the white enclave of Algiers Point in 
New Orleans in the  days after Hurrican Katrina. Although authorities had 
designated the area --  which had largely escaped damage in the storm and flood 
-- 
as a vital evacuation  point for those trapped in the city, a group of white 
residents seized the  opportunity to declare open season on anyone with black 
skin. Many  African-Americans were shot and several were killed; but no one 
knows the exact  number, because New Orleans police have refused to investigate 
any of the  incidents, and coroner's records of the gun-blasted bodies that 
showed up in the  area have unaccountably gone missing. 

Many of the shooters have been  quite open -- even boastful -- of their 
activities, and of their certainty that  they will never be prosecuted. As the 
Nation's A.C. Thompson reports:


[Militia member Wayne Janak is]  equally blunt in Welcome to New Orleans, an 
hourlong documentary produced by  the Danish video team, who captured Janak, 
beer in hand, gloating about  hunting humans. Surrounded by a crowd of 
sunburned white Algiers Point locals  at a barbeque held not long after the 
hurricane, 
he smiles and tells the  camera, "It was great! It was like pheasant season 
in South Dakota. If it  moved, you shot it." A native of Chicago, Janak also 
boasts of becoming a true  Southerner, saying, "I am no longer a Yankee. I 
earned my wings." A white  woman standing next to him adds, "He understands the 
N-word now." In this  neighborhood, she continues, "we take care of our own."

...Some of the gunmen prowling Algiers Point were out to  wage a race war, 
says one woman whose uncle and two cousins joined the cause.  A former New 
Orleanian, this source spoke to me anonymously because she fears  her relatives 
could be prosecuted for their crimes. "My uncle was very excited  that it was a 
free-for-all--white against black--that he could participate  in," says the 
woman. "For him, the opportunity to hunt black people was a  joy."

"They didn't want any of the  'ghetto niggers' coming over" from the east 
side of the river, she says,  adding that her relatives viewed 
African-Americans 
who wandered into Algiers  Point as "fair game." One of her cousins, a young 
man in his 20s, sent an  e-mail to her and several other family members 
describing his adventures with  the militia. He had attached a photo in which 
he 
posed next to an  African-American man who'd been fatally shot. The tone of the 
e-mail, she  says, was "gleeful -- her cousin was happy that "they were 
shooting 
niggers."  


"Jurassicpork" at  "Welcome Back to Pottersville" sums it up well:


But this goes beyond mere race-based paranoia  and becomes a massive, urgent 
commercial for the necessity of a functioning,  efficient and 
community-engaged police department. Hurricane Katrina was  certainly one of 
the greatest 
natural calamities to strike the United States  but people like the Algiers 
Point 
militia, these little Count Zaroffs in  waiting, far from acting out of any 
understandable concern for their property,  used the total lack of law 
enforcement as an opportunity to murder black  people simply for being black 
and 
getting caught on their turf. Far from being  a siege mentality, the center of 
Algiers Point descended into barbarism at the  first available opportunity, the 
minute the blue uniforms disappeared. The  mere absence of law enforcement, in 
their minds, gave them a license to  kill.

In other words, we've actually  regressed several steps from the early 60's 
when three civil rights workers  were murdered in Mississippi by white racists. 
J. Edgar Hoover's FBI had  flooded the area with agents, did a thorough 
investigation and brought several  men to justice (albeit for civil rights 
violations).

Fast forward to 2005-2008: No FBI, no local law  enforcement, no autopsies, 
no records, no pending litigation, no  nothing.
 
 
<_http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1667-a-correction-and-a
n-apology.html_ 
(http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1667-a-correction-and-an-apology.html)
 >
 
 
 



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