Friday, December 19, 2008

WHUT WUZ WE 'SPOSED TA DO?


A.C. Thompson has a devastating piece in The Nation this week describing the all-white militia that took up arms to defend one of the few neighborhoods in New Orleans to stay dry after Hurricane Katrina broke the levees in 2005:

Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men, all of them white, was looking for thieves, outlaws or, as one member put it, anyone who simply "didn't belong."

It started out as a classic case of white paranoiac overreaction to fears of looting and rioting and whatever else it is those black people do -- rather like the reaction you saw in sundown towns in the 1920s, which were similar in being "defended communities," to supposed threats of black depredations -- but quickly morphed into something else altogether:

Fellow militia member Wayne Janak, 60, a carpenter and contractor, is more forthcoming with me. "Three people got shot in just one day!" he tells me, laughing. We're sitting in his home, a boxy beige-and-pink structure on a corner about five blocks from Daigle's Grocery. "Three of them got hit right here in this intersection with a riot gun," he says, motioning toward the streets outside his home. Janak tells me he assumed the shooting victims, who were African-American, were looters because they were carrying sneakers and baseball caps with them. He guessed that the property had been stolen from a nearby shopping mall. According to Janak, a neighbor "unloaded a riot gun"--a shotgun--"on them. We chased them down."

Janak, who was carrying a pistol, says he grabbed one of the suspected looters and considered killing him, but decided to be merciful. "I rolled him over in the grass and saw that he'd been hit in the back with the riot gun," he tells me. "I thought that was good enough. I said, 'Go back to your neighborhood so people will know Algiers Point is not a place you go for a vacation. We're not doing tours right now.'"

He's equally blunt in Welcome to New Orleans, an hourlong documentary produced by the Danish video team, who captured Janak, beer in hand, gloating about hunting humans. Surrounded by a crowd of sunburned white Algiers Point locals at a barbeque held not long after the hurricane, he smiles and tells the camera, "It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it." A native of Chicago, Janak also boasts of becoming a true Southerner, saying, "I am no longer a Yankee. I earned my wings." A white woman standing next to him adds, "He understands the N-word now." In this neighborhood, she continues, "we take care of our own."

Janak, who says he'd been armed with two .38s and a shotgun, brags about keeping the bloody shirt worn by a shooting victim as a trophy. When "looters" showed up in the neighborhood, "they left full of buckshot," he brags, adding, "You know what? Algiers Point is not a pussy community."

... Some of the gunmen prowling Algiers Point were out to wage a race war, says one woman whose uncle and two cousins joined the cause. A former New Orleanian, this source spoke to me anonymously because she fears her relatives could be prosecuted for their crimes. "My uncle was very excited that it was a free-for-all--white against black--that he could participate in," says the woman. "For him, the opportunity to hunt black people was a joy."

"They didn't want any of the 'ghetto niggers' coming over" from the east side of the river, she says, adding that her relatives viewed African-Americans who wandered into Algiers Point as "fair game." One of her cousins, a young man in his 20s, sent an e-mail to her and several other family members describing his adventures with the militia. He had attached a photo in which he posed next to an African-American man who'd been fatally shot. The tone of the e-mail, she says, was "gleeful"--her cousin was happy that "they were shooting niggers."

The ugliest part is that these people talk of this as if what's done is done. It's over. They are clean and free of prosecution, because, as any Conservative will tell you now, "Racism is dead in America since we elected Obama!"

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

From Engineer of Knowledge:
Hello Microdot,
I am also sure that these same people will stress the term “Merry Christmas” because the liberals are making a full out attack on Christmas. Yes these God fearing folks stressing good Christian values are very proud of the season message of “The true meaning of the Christmas Season” and ”Good will towards men.”

God Bless Us Everyone!

mud_rake said...

Indeed, Engineer. I always hove loved the lovely meaningless song, "They will know we are Christians by our love."

Weer'd Beard said...

"WHUT WUZ WE 'SPOSED TA DO?"

Since the police were joining the looters, and violating state and federal law breaking into houses and seizing private and lawfully held property, the only thing they COULD have done is return fire, or run.

I won't lie, I'm very skeptical of the veracity of this video.

Still it takes no look at the larger problem of the aftermath of Katrina.

Sadly moments of lawlessness like this happen fairly frequently, most often in the wake of natural disaster, but the LA Riots are an example of a man-made cause of the breakdown of law and order.

In times like this the strong will prey on the weak. The only option is to not be weak, and refuse to be a victim.

Unknown said...

The message I take from this post is that when we engage in militia mentality and when we arm the citizens we can too easily slip into the lynch mob scenario. What Weer'd suggests is certainly true, but I keep wondering if it's worth it. The folks who believe in arming themselves, in my opinion are responsible for a lot of problems in the country. The question we keep going around and around on my blog is whether they do more harm than good.

Weer'd Beard said...

"The folks who believe in arming themselves, in my opinion are responsible for a lot of problems in the country." I'd say that reality doesn't support that statement, Mike.


And in a situation like Katrina things are VERY dangerous, certainly much more dangerous than any other day, but now you don't have the safety net of being able to call the police.

Your, and your family's safety is in your, and nobody else's hands.

Katrina is one of the worst cases of lawlessness in America in recent memory (tho I'd say the LA Riots aren't too far off) But disasters like this happen often enough for me to consider going without plans and means to be on the side of fool hearty.

microdot said...

You know, Mike, on the post you had about the shooting in Las Vegas and whether it was a hit or a case of road rage, I said half in jest, that it was a hit and that if the victim had had an inkling of what was going to happen and wa armed, it would have been a whole lot messier.
That's the reality, opposed to the fantasy of fiction. Media, Hollywood, the movies ahs presented violence as a choreographed spectacle. Many of us are programmed to thtink that we know how we would react if we were in a "situation".
Beard doubts the veracity of the video. I have been posting on blogs in New Orleans and have had many contacts with New Orleans residents and fromn what I have been been hearing for the last two years or so, this is not only true, but it is the tip of the ice berg.
I will go even further, I have a nephew who lives in Bangkok and is an architect working with housing initiatives for the poor in South East Asia.
he has done much work with the victims of the Tsunami in Thailand and Indonesia. He has bee involved in initiatives that lewt the mdesign their own housing and build it inspite of goverments now helping...with much success.
He has been so successful that he has taken three groups of Banda Achi villagers to New Orleans to have workshops with residents and outreach programs helping them rebuild their lives in spite of the absence of government support and outright road blocks.
He told me stories of white posses coming into black neighborhoods and chasing people away from their own homes and off of their own property!
Beard, If you wanna believe what the lying goverment tells you instead of your own eyes, then that's you problem> This is real and it has been documented and suppressed ever since the news was breaking during Katrina.

I have been having real problems with the internet for the last few days so my posting is very erratic!
bear with me!