<<http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_09_25_atrios_archive.html#112787530711248003>>
The Op-Ed Which Wasn't Run
Rick Perlstein wrote this in the second week of September, and sent it
to various major newspapers for submission. Rick has had great success
in placing such things. It was rejected or simply ignored everywhere he
sent it, including one major newspaper he's never been rejected from.
There are times when being wrong gives your more credibility than being
right, apparently:
A white friend who's volunteering in refugee shelters on the Gulf Coast
tells me the kind of things he's hearing around the small city where
he's working.
A pastor is obsessed that "local" women not be allowed near the
shelters: "At a community meeting they said these were the last
evacuees, the poorest of the poor"--the most criminal, being his
implication, the most likely to rape.
My friend says: "There were rumors that there were basically gangs of
blacks walking up and down the main drag in town harassing business
owners." The current line is that "some of them weren't even evacuees,
they were just fake evacuees trying to stir up trouble and riot, because
we all know that's what they want to do."
He talked to local police, who report no problems: just lost, confused
families, in desperate need of help.
Yet "one of the most ridiculous rumors that has gone around is that 'the
Civic Center is nothing but inmates. It's where they put all the
criminals.'"
I immediately got that uncanny feeling: where had I heard things like
this before?
The answer is: in my historical research about racial tensions forty
years ago. I'm writing a book against the backlash against liberalism
and civil rights in the 1960s. One of the things I've studied is race
riots. John Schmidhauser, a former congressman from rural Iowa, told me
about the time, in the summer of 1966, he held a question and answer
session with constituents. Violence had broken out in the Chicago
ghetto, and one of the farmers asked his congressman about an insistent
rumor:
"Are they going to come out here on motorcycles?"
It's a funny image, a farmer quaking at the vision of black looters
invading the cornfields of Iowa. But it's also awfully serious. The key
word here is "they." It's a fact of life: in times of social stress when
solid information is scarce, rumors fill the vacuum. Rumors are evidence
of panic. The rumors only fuel further panic. The result, especially
when the rumors involved are racial, can be a deadly stew of paranoia.
In the chaotic riot in Detroit in 1967, National Guardsman hopped up on
exaggerated rumors of cop killers would descend upon a block and shoot
out the streetlights to hide themselves from snipers. Guardsmen on the
next block would hear the shots and think they were under attack by
snipers. They would shoot at anything that moved. That was how, in
Detroit, dozens of innocent people were shot. In one case, a firefighter
was the one who died.
And now, a similar paranoia has turned deadly in New Orleans too. The
early report Sunday was that police shot at eight suspicious characters
at the 17th Street Canal, killing five. On Monday the report was
clarified: the victims were contractors on their way to work to fix the
canal.
It's not that human beings haven't committed awful crimes amidst the
toxic muck of New Orleans--just as they did in the urban riots of the
1960s. It's not as if the onslaught of poor, frightened, and
alien-seeming evacuees aren't making life nerve-wracking in the many
scattered towns where they are straggling in as refugees. With
statistical certainly, they have.
But now New Orleans has filled with tens of thousands of Army, police,
and National Guard soldiers. They are doing courageous, necessary work.
But that are also operating in a cultural context rife with paranoia.
Many of the people they are policing are armed as well--also possessed
of a hair-trigger paranoia that might presume every shotgun-like crack,
every snapped powerline, every detonated firecracker, is a sniper's shot
aimed at them.
And now there is that New Orleans diaspora, poor black men ("fake
evacuees"?) wandering around unfamiliar towns.
It is the job of all of us to help ratchet down the paranoia: not to let
the rumors spread. So none of these people start firing on each other.
Paranoia is not the exclusive province of Iowa farmers forty years ago,
or--urban snobs take note--Louisiana yokels in rural parishes now. In
1992, in New York City, during the Los Angeles riots, the word spread on
certain street corners about rioters burning buildings and overturning
cars just a few blocks away. All of it was fantasy.
But now, everyone with an email account can be implicated in the
spreading of such fantasies--nationwide.
One of the most riveting early accounts of conditions in New Orleans was
an email sent around by Dr. Greg Henderson. "We hear gunshots
frequently," he wrote. It wasn't long before that got transformed, in
the dissemination, into: doctors get shot at frequently. An Army Times
article reported that desperate evacuees at the Superdome, terrified
that losing their place in line might mean losing their life, "defecated
where they stood." Now, it's easy, if you take a moment to think about
it, to understand that happening to people, perhaps elderly and sick,
under unendurable conditions of duress. As circulated on the Internet,
however, another interpretation takes shape: these people are not like
us. Them. Savages that, if they come to your town, might just be capable
of anything. Even if they are just lost, confused people, in desperate
need of help.
We can do better. We must do better.
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