From Black Commentator
New Orleans represents a challenge to African Americans, unprecedented since the epic struggles of the Fifties and Sixties. The perverse reality, to which African Americans must rise, is that the man-made disaster in the Gulf provides what may be the last chance to build a real Movement, encompassing the broadest sectors of Black America. Cruel history presents the catastrophe as an unwanted opportunity, a test of Black people's capacity for the operational unity craved by the vast bulk of African Americans. The pain and anger in Black America is all but universal, and demands collective action, the outcome of which will largely define the true State of Black America as it has evolved over the last two generations.Let us put it bluntly: If Black America fails to configure its human, organizational and material resources to effectively resist the theft and ultimate disfigurement of New Orleans, then we will be forced to confront the existence of fundamental, crippling flaws in the African American polity.
There is much reason for optimism. Movements often need monsters, and George Bush and his minions are a horror show. The Katrina debacle plunged Bush's Black approval rating to 12 percent, as measured by the prestigious Pew Research Center. That’s only slightly above what most pollsters consider the approval category's irreducible minimum - "about as low as you can go," according to Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies senior analyst David Bositis. Few doubt that the administration's callous and ineffectual handling of the Katrina crisis ("negligent homicide," charged Black Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney) caused the near-evaporation of Bush's thin Black support.
