New Orleans mayoral candidates Mitch Landrieu and Ray Nagin are illustrating that race matters now more than ever. I am tired of hearing people like Landrieu deny that it’s true, or, in the inverse, watching Nagin manipulate racial politics to get votes.
Racism is a fact; it exists on paper as well as in the mind. If an equally-qualified black and white person apply for the same job, the white person is more likely to get it. This has been proven in practice and study. So people need to stop complaining that media attention was focused too strongly on black residents after the storm. I know white people suffered, but talking about black people suffering shouldn't be threatening or insulting. Let’s face it, the vast majority of the people stranded in the Superdome and the Convention Center were people of color. People of every color lost possessions.
The reason I begin this diatribe is two-fold. First, last Friday on Democracy Now Mitch Landrieu denied that race plays a factor in the rebuilding of New Orleans. He says he is concerned about everybody in New Orleans. Everyone was affected by the storm, but not equally. No one tried to bulldoze any White neighborhoods as did in the Lower Ninth Ward. As long as we deny that race matters we can’t progress to a point where it doesn’t.
Inversely, I'm afraid some people will vote for Nagin because of the color of his skin. I hope New Orleans retains its demographic as a majority "chocolate city," but I'm not going to vote for someone just because he's black. Nagin has already proven empirically that he cannot be trusted to run the city. Nor does he have the political clout necessary get us out of the financial mess we’re in. Voting for Nagin based on the color of his skin is another kind of racial denial, where race matters so much it defies common sense.
Condaleeza Rice is an excellent example, both a woman and black, she’s not doing anything to help either segment of the population. In Iraq, she’s hurting women of color. It is not the color of our skin, nor our gender that ultimately matters; it’s how we think. We need to acknowledge the issues and work beyond them, keeping them in the back of our minds at all times as a frame of reference, without letting them turn into the frame of a cage.
