Thursday, September 15, 2005

Expulsion is Transfer: The Colonial Logic of Bush's Response to New Orleans

It’s not so much that the Emperor has no clothes but that his clothes, under the black sky, are shining white, with many thousands gone, enabled deliberately by his white imperial rule. I believe this to be the only honest, rational conclusion to draw from all the evidence on the ground in New Orleans.

A lot of the shock and awe being expressed in the mainstream media over the Bush administration’s four days of willful indifference toward the suffering of Black people of New Orleans, those who either did not or could not leave, is disingenuous. For example, Chicago’s Mayor Richard M. Daley’s comment that he was “shocked” to hear that Bush wanted no part of a substantial material aid package he had offered on Sunday, one day before the landing of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, is a salient fragment of the noxious whole.