Is it racist?

Listening to NPR & This American Life, the episode that came out a week after the Hurricane. It dabbles in the positive, the familiar sounding fairness and superhuman strength in crisis that I actually grew up with, most of the time.

Then there is the more predominant perspective, also familiar, suspicion of black folks. The stories told during this episode fracture along color lines. It's been a topic that folks have brought up in discussion and I thought I'd weigh in here. My gut is that the media perpetuates specific racist responses in society. I also think that on the other side of it, the media encourages a wildly inappropriate sense of entitlement that almost incessantly focuses on material goodies. This usually isn't a problem, but becomes one in times of crisis.

It should be simple to focus on the present - to strip yourself of your ambitions and make sure those around you are safe -- but if you cannot, it's impossible to help. I think that the folks who got out did the best they could, and that their relatives and friends did the best they could and that somehow, folks got the message that it was ok to take care of just your own. I think that folks who are further out, and the media, did the normal song and dance around racism, once it was obvious that the majority of folks affected are black.

Growing up in DC, I found this alarming -- in my highschool an eye opening spontaneous poll involved asking the class what they thought the percentage of black folks was in America, I guessed around 70%, not the national average of 13% -- because I was looking at who was around me and counting. Now that I've been in Seattle for 16 years, I am living in the first neighborhood that is regularly policed, bright, open and safe. I initially found Seattle frighteningly white. Not because I don't get it that I'm white, it's because I remember the hostile looks white folks would give my friends and could sense the tension I felt spending time with folks who could run into predjudice many times a day.

That, plus learning through experience that my every attempt to liberally repair the damage caused by my people visited on black folks was inevitably not enough, somehow resulted in me not having a chip on my shoulder about racism. I get it. It sucks, is intractible and will take life times to reverse. And I think it was a big fat factor in the resistance we all saw to helping black folks in Katrina's levy breaking wake.

So, that's my soapbox moment. I think we can slam the media not just for it's support of racism (through repeated assumptions around black folks) but can also slam it for it's relentless hawking of entitlement. It's really not appropriate.