Most of us are by now familiar with Barbara Bush’s assessment of the situation of poor evacuees from New Orleans transported to the Astrodome in Houston. Noting on American Public Media's radio program Marketplace that “so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway,” the former first lady concluded, with a slight giggle, that their displacement from their homes “is working very well for them.” In other words, according to Bush, because there are only two options for the poor, mostly African-American evacuees – poverty in New Orleans or life as an displaced person in the Astrodome – they should be content with, even grateful for, their changed circumstances.
Bush’s remarks are, as many commentators have remarked, arrogant, classist, and racist. They are also nothing new. The sentiment she voices – what we might call the rhetoric of limited alternatives – has historically marred white Americans’ discourse about African Americans. As it recurs, we discover whites’ entrenched, troubling assumptions about black Americans and their place in the nation.