I don't imagine it will have any effect on all those ranters who think Dubya has a KKK uniform in his closet (how could you expect them to give up one of their favourite fantasies?) Nevertheless Richard Cohen supplies a thoughtful riposte in his op-ed on Katrina:
[Y]elling racism stops creative thinking. Questions about how reconstruction should be managed, about how relief money should be used, about who will be resettled and where -- all of them fraught with racial issues -- will not be addressed. Instead, as we have already seen, the feds will simply throw gobs and gobs of money at New Orleans and its poor -- never mind how it is spent. Bush has reacted like a conservative's stereotype of a liberal -- just spend the damn money and hope it does some good.
Columnist Stanley Crouch - a close friend of New Orleans wunderkind Wynton Marsalis - wants a war on bad values as well as a war on poverty:
We need something much more thorough than merely spending money and handing out contracts to builders who are hot to make New Orleans a mall that celebrates Mardi Gras while serving gumbo and po'boy sandwiches...
We have successfully beaten down much of the ignorance that long supported bigotry toward so-called minorities and women... [I]t is impossible to believe that we cannot successfully fight the intellectual genocide witnessed in substandard schools and in the numbskull codes that too many confuse with "a different culture" that should be respected. No backward and self-destructive code should ever be respected.
Crouch's column was linked via Booker Rising, a fine news digest catering to black moderates and black conservatives. You see - there is life beyond Al Sharpton.
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