re Watts essay - black/white politics; Watts in the news

[pynchonoid]

Readers of Pynchon's essay may also enjoy Mike Davis'
article at TomDispatch.com:

Poor, Black, and Left Behind
By Mike Davis

The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane
Ivan looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond's version
of the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big
Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less --
mainly Black -- were left behind in their
below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to
face the watery wrath.


New Orleans had spent decades preparing for inevitable
submersion by the storm surge of a class-five
hurricane. Civil defense officials conceded they had
ten thousand body bags on hand to deal with the
worst-case scenario. But no one seemed to have
bothered to devise a plan to evacuate the city's
poorest or most infirm residents. The day before the
hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, New Orlean's daily, the
Times-Picayune, ran an alarming story about the "large
group…mostly concentrated in poorer neighborhoods" who
wanted to evacuate but couldn't.

Only at the last moment, with winds churning Lake
Pontchartrain, did Mayor Ray Nagin reluctantly open
the Louisiana Superdome and a few schools to desperate
residents. He was reportedly worried that lower-class
refugees might damage or graffiti the Superdome.

In the event, Ivan the Terrible spared New Orleans,
but official callousness toward poor Black folk
endures. [...]

But New Orleans isn't the only the case-study in what
Nixonians once called "the politics of benign
neglect." In Los Angeles, county supervisors have just
announced the closure of the trauma center at Martin
Luther King Jr. Hospital near Watts. The hospital,
located in the epicenter of LA's gang wars, is one of
the nation's busiest centers for the treatment of
gunshot wounds. The loss of its ER, according to
paramedics, could "add as much as 30 minutes in
transport time to other facilities."

The result, almost certainly, will be a spate of
avoidable deaths. But then again the victims will be
Black or Brown and poor. [...]

read it all:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1849


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