American Blacks Respond to Katrina

In case you were surprised by the volume of vitriol spewed by Democratic leaders in the wake of Katrina [I know I was, and dismayed too] here's the reason. The solid Black vote was beginning to waver in recent months and Katrina, played as a racial morality drama, is a way to bring them back into line.

AP reports:

To African-Americans, Hurricane Katrina has become a generation-defining catastrophe — a disaster with a predominantly black toll, tinged with racism....

"You'd have to go back to slavery, or the burning of black towns, to find a comparable event that has affected black people this way," said Darnell M. Hunt, a sociologist and head of the African American studies department at UCLA.

If the rescue effort had not been so mishandled, and if those who suffered so needlessly had not been so black and so poor, perhaps Hurricane Katrina would have been just another destructive storm, alongside the likes of Charley and Andrew and Hugo. (There is no Keisha or Kwame.)

But Katrina's searing images — linking nature's wrath and the nation's wrongs — have fanned the smoldering resentments of the civil rights, Reaganomic and hip-hop eras all at once.

"Something about this is making people remember their own personal injustices," said author damali ayo, whose book "How to Rent a Negro" takes a satirical look at race relations.

Read the whole thing here.

Katrina was a tremendous windfall [ouch!] for Democrats in this sense: the experience, as the article notes, touched African-Americans deeply, forging a new common bond -- one that Democrats can exploit. If they can fix the blame squarely on Bush in the minds of African-Americans, all of the Republican efforts to attract black votes will be undone overnight and the loyalty of their most consistent constituency will be ensured for another generation.