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This slate article is race baiting... there are people that want to make this about the issues that will gain them political capitol.

I truely find that disgusting.

But we will see more of it i am sure....

There is no race issue here... there reason there are so many blacks that are stuck in NO is becuase the compromise 67% by the articles # of the population. So by the laws of avereages there will be more of them then any other race...

The only once that have an issue with race in this is those that are bringing it up like this slate articles author and doing for nothing more than trying to gain political capitol.

I agree completely. Well said.

Americanwolf -- great points! I was quite upset (to say the least) at the race-baiting issue when I read the Slate article and saw the coverage on the cable networks. Of course, we knew it had to come. Shafer does have a valid point when he refers to media timidity. Below is my own diatribe on the whole subject: Elephant in the Room.

With regard to the human tragedy now unfolding in New Orleans, the elephant in the room is not the fact of the victims being largely black and poor. I would assert that it is not about race or class, as some on CNN have surmised, but rather about culture and ideology.

Culture is defined as the system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that the members of society use to cope with their world and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning. (Bates, D. and Plog, F. (1990.) Cultural Anthropology, 3rd Edition. New York: McGraw Hill. p.7). The glaring fact that everyone tries to ignore as politically incorrect, the unwanted message that individuals such as Bill Cosby have tried to communicate, is that the central issue is not the oppression of one race by another, but rather the existence and perpetuation of a subculture that encourages those who share it to oppress themselves. I am talking about a subculture of self-enforced mediocrity that says no one can be successful if it makes others feel bad about themselves. This is a subculture that leads angry hurricane survivors to ask on CNN: What have they done to help me and others? instead of asking themselves What can I do to help myself and others? This is a subculture that allows the survivors at the Superdome to avoid organizing tasks such as collecting and transporting the deceased to a centralized location inside the Superdome, rather than leaving them where they died. This is the subculture that allows these survivors to live among their own excrement, rather than organizing a sanitation detail and designating latrine areas. Instead, these survivors sit passively and complain that others are not doing enough, fast enough, for them. This is in sharp contrast to the stories of other survivors who gathered their families and walked out of New Orleans to a highway, where they were able to flag down a ride. The elephant in the room is the national, tacit acceptance of a culture that promotes passive dependency and victimhood, rather than active self-reliance and heroism; the tacit encouragement of a subculture that permits those who share it to blame others when they fail in the face of adversity, a subculture that encourages those who share it to expect to be given whatever they want, rather than encouraging real achievement, genuine merit, and the attitudes, beliefs, values, customs, and behaviors that promote them.

The subculture described above is supported and encouraged with a prevailing ideology. Ideology may be defined as a relatively coherent system of values, beliefs, biases, opinions, preferences, stereotypes and ideas shared by some social group and often taken for granted as natural, inherently true or self-evident. Andre Malraux once said that Marxism is not a doctrine per se, but rather a will, a will to feel proletariat; i.e., an ideology. Likewise, in the 21st century American subculture described above, there is less actual racial oppression, and more of a will to feel racially oppressed. Genetic anthropologists insist that there is no biological basis for race. Indeed, many social scientist assert that race is a socially constructed concept without biological implications, (like ones gender, as opposed to ones sex.) In short, the concept of race is one that supports an ideology of domination, a set of beliefs that are held to justify one groups desire to dominate another; or conversely, to justify another groups feeling of victimhood and injustice that offers, in Eric Frommes terms, an escape from freedom; that is, an escape from responsibility for ones own fate.

Certainly racist groups exist, within each race, but they are merely the loudest, most odious elements, not the most numerous or prevalent. As real equality has advanced, groups such as the Black Caucus, the NAACP, NOW, and the Nation of Islam have become increasingly radicalized in order to justify their own existence. It is these new radicals, operating within established and venerated civil rights organizations, who perpetuate and condone an ideology of race, and the subculture of victimhood that traps millions of Americans in self-imposed poverty, and who bear ultimate responsibility for the unnecessary deaths and violence in post-Katrina New Orleans. Despite the ultimate culpability of such radicals, there is also blame for a timid media and a politically correct, but factually fallacious sense of racial guilt that prohibits a hard-nosed assessment of the facts in favor of a softhearted attempt to validate everyones viewpoint, even in the face of serious error.