(Untitled)

[anjibobanji]

Ethnic Studies faculty and grad students are filling up my mailbox, angry about coverage of the fire, taking apart the "natural" in natural disaster, there are so many congratulatory comparisons to Hurricane Katrina, zero coverage of reservations burning (and the lack of help they are getting opposed to middle and upper class white neighborhoods

Comments

[loolica]

Do you remember when it was all going down and there were all those media stories about how a hospital had been looted and patients or nurses raped and I don't know what all else? And then it turned out that nothing like that had happened at all? The hospital was fine and people were being taken care of. There was such a sickening undertone of look at this descent into savage chaos after the civilizing effect of white people is removed.

In "When the Levees Broke" a man tells the story of his mom dying at the Superdome of some combination of old age/poor health/shock/heat stroke/who knows what.

I feel like the reporting I have heard--which is admittedly little, and also, Canadian--has had this real slant where they are trying to say "look at how much we learned from Katrina," and I think they are trying to spin it as a feel-good, look we aren't in danger from catastophe/the enemy/global warming because now we know how to treat people, triumph over adversity kind of story. But because there's no analysis of race or class or the other differences, instead it comes off as if they are trying to say, We are so much better than they were. My first thought when I heard about the clowns and the spa treatment was, God, this is why people hate California.