An interesting comment in Melissa Harris-Perry's latest piece that was overlooked, but very salient:

[Empowerer]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/163629/epistemology-race-talk

Along with several colleagues I conducted a national survey in 2005 measuring how Americans felt in the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. The racial gap in how black and white Americans saw the event was striking. A strong majority of white Americans believed the government response has little or nothing to do with race, while an overwhelming number of black Americans believed the response was racialized. No one can “prove” which perception is accurate. But that is beside the point. If more than two-thirds of black citizens believe that their government will allow them to drown and dehydrate and die on national television because of their race, then there is something here worth discussing. And the discussion cannot be about how black people are just too sensitive.

Hear, hear.

[OHdem10]

1. I realize there was a racial factor. Some white people may have

seen this as a class issue. Poor People can be neglected
because they have no power.

In La, at the time many things pointed to race. Poor whites
were not treated so great either. Just putting this out
there as a thought, not to promote divisiveness.

[Douglas Carpenter]

2. as we all remember that vast differences in perception at the time of the OJ Simpson trial

I also know from working in the Middle East both a the time of the first Gulf War of 1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003- white American military personnel almost without exception accepted the official line while black American military personnel were far, far more skeptical. Clearly there are fairly common differences between how the different American ethnic communities see the world.

[lumberjack_jeff]

3. Yeah! And remember how all the liberals wanted to just let them die?

Oh, wait.

If it was overlooked, it was because it wasn't germane to her point about how white liberals are treating Obama.

Racism exists, but that doesn't mean that every phenomenon I disapprove of is evidence of it.

[Empowerer]

6. You obviously didn't read the whole piece

Otherwise you'd know that this didn't come from the piece to which you're referring - it's in the piece she wrote today. It wasn't germane to the piece she wrote the other day - but it IS germane to the most recent article.

And by saying it was overlooked, I was no way implying any evil motive in it being overlooked. It's just that no one seemed to notice it and I thought it was important.

You're really being very defensive . . . calm down. :-)

[roguevalley]

4. here is one white person who knows class and race were the

cause. there were no donations down there to depend upon so they were expendable. it is the shame of our nation. Forever.

[OneGrassRoot]

5. "..then there is something here worth discussing"

To me, that's the whole point.

It's not about Obama, it's not about blame, it's not about being sensitive or defensive.

Racism and bigotry exist, and if people perceive either as present or pervasive in any area of our society, it is definitely worth discussing. Calmly and intelligently, but most of all honestly.

The words "racism" and "bigotry" should signal the beginning of a conversation, not the end.

[Enrique]

7. it would be salient if Harris-Perry had said she "believed" such-and-such

but that's not what she said.

She's a political scientist, she made claims about people's motivations, she should back it up, which in my opinion she did not do very well.

[Blue Meany]

8. I always thought it was a messy mix of race, class and politics...

The Republicans benefited from the dispersal of a large, largely Democratic-voting population. Remember that the Bush White House politicized *everything.* There was a report that Karl Rove even reviewed county-level data on govt. expenditures to ensure the funds to counties that did not vote for Bush were cut at the beginning of the administration. The fact that it was a largely black city and that the victims were mostly black and poor, of course, made it easier to ignore them. And I think that racism clearly played a role in the actions of local law enforcement.

But to me what was particularly telling was that I went to a number of liberal/Democratic web-sites at that time and they all working in some way to help the victims by raising money, recruiting volunteers, or finding places to stay for those who had lost their homes (Moveon.org). Conservative web-sites, on the other hand, either were doing nothing or were trying to raise money for themselves off the crisis. You would think they would at least have put in links to those many right-wing evangelical churches that were on the front lines providing assistance <sarcasm>.

[Hoosier Daddy]

9. In this country,

there's ALWAYS a racial aspect. K&R!

[boston bean]

10. It's funny she should use that in her dissection of Joans racial bias or racism..

Here is Joan Walsh in 2005.

'Katrina' and America's Race Problems

Ever since the first looting photos made cable news I've felt sick, like here we go again, we're going to have a new round in the culture war about the poor. Are they victims, or barbarians? If Sean Hannity's attacking them, well, I sure as hell have to defend them. When right-wing blogger Boortz is saying shoot them on sight, somebody has to say that's sick and crazy, right? Personally, with all the destruction in view on Tuesday and Wednesday, I couldn't be horrified by people stealing food; I didn't even care much about people running off with sneakers and beer and TVs. Looting Wal-Mart? I don't defend it, but what do we expect? These are desperately poor people who've been deliberately left behind, in so many senses of the word -- left behind by society, shut up in housing projects and hideous poverty, and now truly left behind by local and federal officials who failed to come up with an evacuation plan for people too poor and isolated to leave on their own. If looting Wal-Mart was the worst of it, I thought, we should consider ourselves lucky.

But it wasn't. Thursday we saw people shooting at rescue helicopters (with guns they stole from Wal-Mart, perhaps?), at hospital supply trucks, at workers trying to evacuate the sick from hospitals, the horrifying next chapter in an already awful story. I started to feel like my indifference to yesterday's looting was morally lazy, a reflexive shrug at having to really think about the poor, who they are, why they are. What a crazy, depraved way to treat people who are trying to help. But having said that, we're not absolved from trying to understand and reckon with the chaos. Like it or not, this crisis is going to be with us for a long time, because it's been coming for a long time -- we're going to have to face issues of race, poverty and civil rights we've long chosen to ignore.

As I watched buses make their way from the Superdome to the Astrodome in Houston, in a surreal and perverse echo of the Freedom Rides of the '60s, a few thoughts were inescapable. Why didn't we send a caravan of buses into the city's poorest neighborhoods on Saturday or Sunday, when the dimensions of the disaster were already predictable? And what is really going to happen in Houston? These are dispossessed people who've been further dispossessed -- do we have a word for that? After a few days, the Superdome is already a slice of hell, with overflowing bathrooms, fights, rape allegations and now, people dying outside. Do we expect the Astrodome -- abandoned by the Houston Astros in 2000 for Enron Field, excuse me, Minute Maid Park -- to fare much better? Sure, Houston's got electricity and running water, but tens of thousands of scared, angry people packed into an abandoned sports stadium -- we couldn't come up with a better symbol of how little we care about the poor, how little we've thought about what to do with them, for them, if we tried.

As if to make sure we didn't miss the ironies, the same week as Katrina came news that the poverty rate has climbed again, the fourth straight year under President Bush. But let's be fair: John Kerry barely mentioned the poor last year. And while President Clinton's booming 1990s lifted some boats, and his welfare reform at least muted the ideological sniping about whether poor folks were victims or freeloaders, nobody's bothered lately to pay much attention to whether welfare reform made people's lives better, whether it paved a path out of poverty or just moved its subjects into the vast ranks of the working poor.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,372715,00.html

[Empowerer]

11. All the more reason Joan should have been called on her "friend" remark

She should know better.

And, to her credit, I think she'll learn from this episode, which is all we can hope for in any of these discussions.

There's no sin in having biases. The sin is in pretending we don't have any and in ignoring and/or attacking those who point them out instead of actually trying to address them.

I have lots of respect for and faith in Joan Walsh - she gets it.

[boston bean]

12. oh yeah, Joan is racially biased if that sounds better to you than racist?

You really think she wrote that to keep Melissa in her place? To put Melissa down? To say see I'm not racist in writing this, I got a black friend?

Come on, please get honest.

Melissa is being ridiculous.

[Enrique]

13. there's other sins too

the sin of being unfair to others, the sin of saying things about people that aren't true.