Medium, Message, Race and the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

Medium, Message, Race and the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

I have no television, no computer, and I don't listen to the radio. I get the news from my cell phone links to CNN and ABC.

The print medium is a burlesque, revealing and concealing and leaving to the imagination what is concealed. It can be just as emotional, evocative and provocative than the electronic media with their direct imagery and intonation changes but their effects are different. The medium affects the message.

I read first in surprise at the difficulties in the post-storm relief efforts. That gave way to bewilderment at how things could have apparently gone so wrong. Then, typically of me and I believe a critical mass of other Americans, in anger at those who were responsible.

Then came the reports of criminals shooting at helicopters trying to land at the hospitals and most painfully for me the stories of women who were raped when they tried to go to the restrooms in the Superdome and the convention center.

I pictured the criminals as all black and I was furious at yet another example, as if we needed any more, of the social, moral and functional bankruptcy of the black community in America.

The decision-makers I blamed were the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana in that order. The federal government and President Bush I had together at a distant third.

I imagined the mayor and governor to be Democrats and I was furious at them and at the Democratic party, believing their inaction to be symptomatic of the party's timidity in crises. The next day I goaded my yellow-dog friends with an email asking if the mayor and governor were in fact Democrats, honestly not knowing if they were. Their abashed reply fueled my anger and growing cynicism.

Two nights ago I was over at my babies mamma's house and for the first time saw the television images.

It had been so long since I had looked at TV that the location of the different channels on the dial had changed. CNN used to be channel 13, MSNBC used to be 11, Fox used to be 64. They weren't in their usual places so I had to channel flit until I found a news station. As it happened the first I found was Fox.

Bill O'Reilly was hosting the segment and I saw the images of the looters, all African-American with O'Reilly's voice-overs of condemnation and disgust, both proper in my view, both of the criminals and of the day-late and dollar-short relief effort.

I then lit on MSNBC. Keith Olberman was cracklingly angry, again appropriately from where I sat, at the apparent failure of the relief effort. Olberman was particularly angry at Rush Limbaugh's assertion that those who stayed in New Orleans could have gotten out but chose not to. Olberman termed Limbaugh "clueless," which I thought appropriate.

To answer these charges from the clueless Limbaugh, Olberman brought on the Rev. Al Sharpton. Click.

Yesterday at lunch when I told my girlfriend about my chronology of television news gathering and clicking away the moment Sharpton appeared she asked if I was not dismissing the message for the messenger. I said that I had but that it was MSNBC's choice to have Sharpton, a liar, charlatan and pedagogue to make the anti-Limbaugh case and that their choice had debased the message.

I went back to Fox and noticed that the same loop of footage was being rerun Groundhog Day-like. A policeman pushing a young Hispanic man out of a looted store, a teenage black boy turning over a garbage can at the feet of another policeman. O'Reilly was now saying that he had predicted this violence and that in his view those who had refused to evacuate had done so deliberately because they saw this "opportunity" to loot, shoot and rape coming. That did not sound convincing to me. So many messengers, so little time in which to dismiss them all. Click.

I found CNN. Their footage was about the same, the interior shots of the Superdome, the dead woman in the wheelchair, the girl who went into diabetic shock. But there wasn't the endless loopty-loop of Fox's lawless minorities against white police officers.

Then I began to see on all the networks--it was there from the beginning I had just not seen--that virtually all of the refugees were black, so many were old, sick, infirm, very young and very poor, that (1) It did not appear to me that they could have gotten out without being forcibly evacuated, i.e. it did not appear to me that they had made a choice to stay. (2) They appeared to me to be good law-abiding citizens in hopeless situations (3) The property being looted was overwhelmingly foodstores and the like.

I had read stories of looters brazenly displaying for the cameras stolen clothing and I have no reason to doubt those stories but I did not see it, nor did I see the corollary that I expected, young black men and women pushing shopping carts with stolen TVs in them.

(4) Most ashamedly for me I now imagined what I knew to be true from my work as a prosecutor, that the victims of the young black male lawlessness were, as they almost always are, black also, young, old, poor, female, all vulnerable. It was not, or was not just, doctors and policemen, presumably mostly white, who were the victims. It was, I bet, overwhelmingly black people who were raped and otherwise personally assaulted.

And now that my thinking, or maybe more accurately my reactions, had so "evolved" I had to ask myself some questions. First,why did I first concentrate on the race of the perpetrators?

Second,why did I not at first think what the likely race of the victims was?

Third,was I more angry than I "should have been" at the black criminals when I hadn't considered the race of the victims?

Fourth,what difference "should it" make that the victims were of whatever race?

Fifth, was I more sanguine when I realized, as a white man, that the victims of black violence were likely to be black?

I'm thinking as I'm writing (the better way being to think and then write) and I'm feeling defensive right now but there's some value in expression under these circumstances too.

My answer to the first question is because I just knew it to be true. The criminals were going to be black. A few years ago a well-publicized study showed that something like 40% of all black men between the ages of, say, 18-35 were either in jail, serving prison sentences, or on probation or some other form of community control. I still comfortable with my reaction.

The answer to the second question is not as easy for me. I know from twenty-three years of prosecuting that almost all victims of black crime are black, but that was not what first came to my mind when I read the reports. The reports left me with the impression of white victims: store owners, police officers and doctors but I can't blame the media for that impression. I know too well the truth.

It is painful to me to have to admit that the answer to the third and fifth questions is yes. My anger abated when I realized that the victims were likely to be black also. I will say in my defense that my anger did not leave an emotional vacuum of indifference. It was replaced by sadness that the loopty-loop of black male violence on vulnerable black people was replaying itself Groundhog Day-like again.

The answer to the fourth question "should be" no. It wasn't but as I reflect on my thinking I honestly think that I was concentrating on the status of what I was being told the victims were, doctors, police officers and business owners. Yes, those people are and were in my mind overwhelmingly more likely to be white. But status differences, and the reaction to them is appropriate in my view and in the view of the law and common sense.

For as long as we have had the modern incarnation of the death penalty the status of the victim has been a lawful, in my view appropriate, consideration in whether to seek the ultimate penalty.

It is an "aggravator" under Florida law that the victim was performing his duties as a police officer because a murder of a person of that status strikes at society as a whole in the way that a murder of a non-governmental official does not. For example if Hillary Clinton had killed Bill Clinton upon discovery of his affair with Monica Lewinsky that would not have been a death penalty aggravator under Florida law. If Rush Limbaugh had killed him because he was the president that would have been an aggravator. Similarly if the victim is a child or an elderly person, that status of being particularly vulnerable is a death penalty aggravator.

So I cannot fault myself for being particularly outraged that ambulance drivers, helicopter rescue pilots and doctors were the targets of the snipers.

The rape reports affected me as I think rape does most people, men and women, white and black. It is such a personal violation, etc. etc. But it also plays on cultural stereotypes. I am not as offended by homosexual prison rape as I am by male on female street rape for more than one reason but one of them is the status of sex with a female. Culturally it is still something that men must seek as a reward, that women give only to those who are worthy and that men should never take forcibly. I don't know if that if a "valid" reason for outrage or not.

I don't remember if I had a particular image of the rape victims in my mind when I first read the reports. I believe the first reports I heard were of roving bands of rapists accosting women on the street, rather than as I understand it more to be the case now, that the rapes happened in the shelters.

I do find it more reprehensible that gangs of young men would go marauding through the streets looking for women to rape. That is heightened premeditation and social pathology rather than the more "opportunistic" rapes that would occur when tens of thousands of desperate people are thrown together in a shelter.

It is not clear to me upon reflection that I presumed the race of the rape victims to be white but I cannot say that I did not presume that. Giving myself no benefit of the doubt, that is that at some level of consciousness or subconsciousness I did picture a blonde white girl who was caught "in the wrong part of town" and was gangraped by a group of young black men, then that is a "wrong" reaction.

Her status, which is solely her race, and the rapists status, which is solely their race, should be irrelevant. But as I write this, even not being sure that race did play a part in my reaction, as I write of a blonde white girl getting raped by a group of black steeet criminals I am more emotionally effected than I would be if the victim were black and I feel very, very bad about that. I am ashamed and I want to change that in my feelings.

-Benjamin Harris