Steve Gilliard has a link to a Salon.com article by Debra Dickerson that is inexplicable. Here is the title and intro/abstract at the top of the article…
Not in my backyard, either
After the poor kids next door took advantage of me, I felt sympathy for the people of Houston, who’ve suffered crime and violence because of struggling Katrina exiles.
Dickerson then goes on to write about HER troubles with the neighbors whom she described as “the equivalent of Katrina evacuees.”
What the heck does that mean?
It appears from that description and her intro which describes them as “poor kids” that they are not Katrina evacuees. So salon.com has let Dickerson run on with some ass backward logic that basically says… hey I lived next to poor black people who bugged the shit out of me too, no matter how nice I was, so yeah all those evacuees in Houston are really bad and hating them is just fine.
Ai yi yi!
One salon.com reader who self describes as a “Katrina refugee” wrote a good letter to the editor which described her situation (not poor and still in exile) and ends with…
I hope Salon will do the responsible thing and publish an article about the challenges refugees are really facing, a nice investigative journalistic piece that enlightens its readers about how lobbyists have stolen the recovery, and doesn’t just reinforce their belief that bad things only happen to those who deserve it in America. It’s not okay for a writer to assume she knows something about a great number of people and their suffering, then tie it to some socio-economic elitist prejudice and tell the Salon reader it is okay to stop caring about what happened in New Orleans.
Amen