Poll shows racial divide on storm response

[SemiCharmedQuark]

"Six in 10 African-Americans say the fact that most hurricane victims were poor and black was one reason the federal government failed to come to the rescue more quickly. Whites reject that idea; nearly 9 in 10 say those weren't factors."

"mages of the looters shown grabbing food, water and TV sets also split along racial lines. Whites by 50%-44% say most of those involved were criminals taking advantage of a situation. Blacks by 77%-16% say they were mostly desperate people trying to find a way to survive.

"We live in a great land, a land of opportunity," says Gilda Hutcheson, 59, a retired railroad worker in Morrow, Ga., who responded to a request for comments on usatoday.com. "If black leaders would spend as much time encouraging people to be self-reliant as they spend encouraging the free handouts from the government, then the people left in New Orleans would have had the means and opportunity to have bought that $50 bus ticket and have gotten out ahead of the storm."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20050913/ts_usatoday/pollshowsracialdivideonstormresponse

[Brewman_Jax]

1. Some things never change

white people find items, black people loot.
white defendant acquitted, black defendant gets away with crime.
on and on, etc. :(

[Autonomy]

2. It was absolutely racial: "they" were looting and terrorizing

so "they" did not deserve to be rescued. That's the typical mentality, and it's supportable if you don't look at the situation more than once: it was black people going around mugging, killing, and looting during the crisis, and it was black people stuck in NOLA, so...

I hope you didn't expect more of a connection. That's all there is. Any time you use a third-person pronoun to express "otherness", there's no telling who exactly you're describing. The same method was employed in the Iraq War. That's how THEY (the idiots) came up with "they bombed the World Trade Center". It was true! They did! If the "they" refered to is Muslims.

[Karenina]

3. and "their" lack of decorum

during this tragic event has "tarnished" Amurikka's image abroad, "them" runnin' wild and loose in the streets and all! Some people just don't know how to act!

[Autonomy]

4. And we all know who those "some people" are

The black law enforcement deserves just as much blame as the looters & shooters. Why didn't THEY keep THEIR people under control? This is the prevalent underlying mentality. Middle white America believes it explicitly, and the powers-that-be believe it just as much, only more implicitly.

It's just a third-person plural attribution error. We (humans) get lazy and want to use pronouns to describe a group when we can't find an accurate descriptive term for that group. But once we fall back on using pronouns, we immediately and unconsciously fall into assuming that the defining characteristic of that plurality is what is most noticeable of that group. Hence, it was all about race. Not because people are maliciously racist, but because we (humans) tend to be lazy.