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Journalist A.C. Thompson, writing for The Nation magazine, documented that white vigilantes shot black men at will during Hurricane Katrina in Algiers Point, part of the City of New Orleans, and no one has been investigated, much less prosecuted. Furthermore, associated video of white men boasting about their deeds indicates the men acted with police approval.
Thompson's article will appear in the January 5, 2009 edition of The Nation, and Thompson says he was surprised at how easy it was to find witnesses, victims, and perpetrators of Katrina vigilantism targeting black men. He's hoping readers will learn something from his article:
The new information should reframe our understanding of the catastrophe. Immediately after the storm, the media portrayed African-Americans as looters and thugs--Mayor Ray Nagin, for example, told Oprah Winfrey that "hundreds of gang members" were marauding through the Superdome. Now it's clear that some of the most serious crimes committed during that time were the work of gun-toting white males.
(Professor Lance) Hill, who runs Tulane's Southern Institute for Education and Research and closely follows the city's racial dynamics, isn't surprised the Algiers Point gunmen have eluded arrest. Because of the widespread notion that blacks engaged in looting and thuggery as the disaster unfolded, Hill believes, many white New Orleanians approved of the vigilante activity that occurred in places like Algiers Point. "By and large, I think the white mentality is that these people are exempt--that even if they committed these crimes, they're really exempt from any kind of legal repercussion," Hill tells me. "It's sad to say, but I think that if any of these cases went to trial, and none of them have, I can't see a white person being convicted of any kind of crime against an African-American during that period." ("Katrina's Hidden Race War," The Nation)
The young or naive reader may be shocked at Professor Hill's assessment. I'm not. I grew up in New Orleans, moved away after marriage and lived elsewhere in the South, the Midwest, and on the East Coast. Last year, I returned as a divorced woman with children. While I acknowledge Louisiana has made strides toward racial justice, I know that many of its non-black residents still believe that violence against African-Americans based on the assumption of guilt in criminal activity is acceptable.
We have a certain type of white "citizen" mindset here that would denounce lynching, but under certain circumstances declare that shoot-to-kill is the correct course of action if you think a black person stole something, hurt someone, or suspect he or she has the potential to commit a crime. In particular, people of this mindset would give another white person the benefit of the doubt that he acted justly if he shot a black person who was "out of place," meaning in a white neighborhood after sundown.
Police officers' right to shoot under such circumstances is unquestionable, which is why I'm very cautious about my son being out alone at night. However, if you're not a police officer, it's highly probable you'll get off for shooting or beating a black person if you know the magic words: "I thought he was a criminal."
Now, these types of shootings don't happen often compared to fifty years ago, which is why you don't read about them more. Nevertheless, the system remains in place to help a white person out should he/she have a shot-negro-under-duress situation. Hurricane Katrina, apparently, is one of those situations.
I've figured out that all kinds of unseemly behavior from white citizens is acceptable if they can claim it happened during Hurricane Katrina or as a result of Hurricane Katrina "refugees" scaring them, but police officers were the first to receive their get-out-of-jail free cards for violence against black people or threatening violence against black people during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.
I remember when I was living in New Jersey and heard about an incident in Slidell, La., in which the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff vowed to stop any black man with dreadlocks walking the streets after dark and question him. His vow followed a horrendous, post-Katrina, drug-related multiple murder in which a witness gave the vague description that men with dreadlocks and something the sheriff called "chee wee" hair had committed the murders. He believed the men came into Slidell from New Orleans, specifically they were poor people from New Orleans housing projects, he figured.
While people across the nation and in New Orleans were appalled by the
