In a biting, angry attack on the Bush administration, NAACP chairman Julian Bond equated the president’s handling of Katrina with a “lynching” of Black people, calling it a “deliberate effort to dispossess Black landowners.”
“From the outset, Katrina was about race. America, after all, scrambled spells: ‘I am race.’ That could well be the tagline for Katrina,” Bond said in his opening remarks at the University of Virginia’s first Symposium on Race and Society, held late last week. The Katrina symposium was the first in what UVa. officials hope will be an annual two-day discussion on race in society.
Bond’s speech received a standing ovation from the 200 attendees. However, the subsequent two days of panel discussions made clear that society remains divided. Was governmental incompetence to blame for the nearly 1,900 deaths and $81.2 billion cost of the worst natural disaster ever to strike the United States? Or was Kanye West right when he famously declared that “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people?”
While opinion polls are divided along racial lines, Bond, also a UVa. professor of history, was clear on where he stood: “This blame the victim mentality suggests racial animus,” he said. “It is closely connected to the ignorance that underlies the surprise expressed by many at the level of inequality on display in the Katrina case.”
The question of blame, though, came up repeatedly but drew few firm answers.
“It was a classic bureaucratic mess of dispersed responsibility,” says Christopher Wrobel, a UVa. student doing his undergraduate thesis on New Orleans in the decade leading up to Katrina. “New Orleans’ significance nationally was on the wane, so I’m not surprised that the levees were left uncorrected.”
Wrobel says he hoped the conference would give him insight into the role of race.
