by Keith Boykin
6
GEORGE W. BUSH’S “SOFT BIGOTRY”
The Fire Island Ferry moved quietly past the boats docked along the marina, until we reached the end of the Browns River. There, the first roar of the engine abruptly alerted me that the journey had begun for what would be the last major celebration of my thirties. As we raced into the Great South Bay between New York’s Long Island and Fire Island that Friday afternoon, the seemingly endless expanse of water crashing against the crisp blue skies reminded me just how tiny was my place in the universe.
There had always been something about the water—that beautiful but powerful presence that covers more than 70 percent of the earth’s surface—that both fascinated and frightened me. As a child in my hometown of St. Louis, I was drawn to the towering arch that rose from the banks of the Mississippi River. In college, I led a canoe trip for new students along the Connecticut River. Even after I had almost drowned on a stolen paddle boat in the Mediterranean Sea during a foreign study program in Spain, I still loved the water. But nothing I had ever experienced felt as special as the ride from Sayville to Fire Island. At the very moment the ferry enters the bay, the body relaxes, the worries disappear, and, for twenty minutes the troubles of the outside world vanish into the air, vaporizing into the gusts of wind that blow the American flag on the bow of the speeding vessel.
I had a few days left to enjoy my thirties when I stepped onto the wooden planks of a quaint little community called “the Pines.” No cars or bikes are allowed on this part of the island, and so I dutifully carried my bags to the gates of a handsome waterside home with a swimming pool and jacuzzi facing the bay. The home belonged to a friend, who generously provided it for the event, and, for that weekend, it would be the location for an early celebration of my fortieth birthday. As dozens of my friends joined for food and drinks and camaraderie, I was successfully distracted from the recognition that I was getting older. In addition, the birthday party in “the Pines” represented the first time I had seen so many Black people in one space, and I felt a slight sense of accomplishment that we had collectively helped to make this beautiful, but notoriously white, island just a little bit more welcoming for a diverse crowd.
Nearly 1,400 miles away, a close friend was preparing for his own life transition. Dr. Anthony Pinder had been the associate dean for global studies at Dillard University in New Orleans, and he was just a few weeks from relocating to Atlanta to start a new job at Morehouse College. Where Fire Island had a reputation as a haven of whiteness, New Orleans and Atlanta were both Black cities with proud histories and rich cultural traditions. Dr. Pinder had lived in the Crescent City for six years, had seen storms pass New Orleans many times before, and was not particularly concerned when a tropical depression formed far away in the Bahamas on Tuesday afternoon. It was five days before my birthday, and Pinder’s focus was on selling his house in the Black middle-class neighborhood of the Seventh Ward called Gentilly. By Friday, the tropical storm from the Bahamas had been upgraded to a Category 2 hurricane headed to New Orleans, and the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, declared a state of emergency. The following day, Saturday, August 27, New Orleans mayor, Ray Nagin, received a phone call from Max Mayfield, the director of the National Hurricane Center. “Mr. Mayor, the storm is headed right for you,” Mayfield said. “I’ve never seen a hurricane like this in my 33-year career. And you need to order mandatory evacuation.”
While Dr. Pinder was busy prepping his house for the storm, I turned on the television to see a breaking news story on CNN. Mayor Ray Nagin stood at a podium in a white polo shirt emblazoned with a small blue fleur-de-lis that symbolized his city. With his shiny shaved head and surrounded by ten sober-faced government officials, Nagin slowly read a mandatory evacuation order he had just issued for New Orleans. “The storm surge most likely will topple our levee system,” the mayor warned. He told residents to get out of the city but announced that the Superdome was opening as a “refuge of last resort” for those who could not evacuate. Even the famous football stadium would not be a comfortable place, he cautioned, because the hurricane would likely knock out all electricity in the city. It was Sunday, August 28, 2005, my fortieth birthday, and the mayor’s alarming announcement told me that all my thoughts of celebration would soon be swept away with the rising waters of tragedy in New Orleans.
Dr. Pinder was by now well aware that the situation was dire, but not all of his neighbors shared his level of concern. Just a day earlier, the skies had been clear when one of his neighbors told him that he did not want to evacuate his elderly mother because she only had one leg and would be difficult to move. It had been forty years since a major hurricane had struck New Orleans, and many residents wondered whether Katrina would be yet another in a long line of hurricanes that had threatened the city but failed to materialize. But after the mayor and the governor spoke at the press conference Sunday morning, there was nothing left to wonder.
Pinder grabbed everything in the house that he could fit into his Saturn sport utility vehicle and secured his dog—a chow chow named Moka—into the front passenger seat for a drive to Atlanta. With a number of gas stations closed for the storm and traffic piled up on the highway, what was normally a six- or seven-hour trip on Interstate 10 instead lasted twenty-five hours. By the time he arrived at his destination in Georgia, a levee had broken at the London Avenue Canal back in Louisiana, sending billions of gallons of water into the Gentilly neighborhood. Long before he had time to find a home in Atlanta, his old home in New Orleans had already been destroyed; 80 percent of the city was under water. And when it was all over, his neighbor’s mother was dead.
Unfortunately, Dr. Pinder’s story is not unusual. Nearly half a million residents of pre-Katrina New Orleans were devastated by the storm. Hundreds of thousands were forced to leave their homes. Huge swaths of the city were flooded. More than a thousand people died. Entire neighborhoods were virtually wiped off the map. And despite the failure of local officials to evacuate all of their residents, the persistent impression left by the crisis was that the federal government allowed a major American city to drown. And not just any city. It was New Orleans, a crown jewel of the South, known for its music, its food, and its culture, and known to be a Black city with a thriving middle class. The damage was incalculable, and the city never fully recovered. Nearly fifteen years after that catastrophic hurricane, much of the physical structure of the city had been rebuilt, but nearly one hundred thousand Black residents never came back. One out of every three Black people who lived in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina had gone.
Of course, this is not just a story about the powerful waters of a hurricane. It is a story about the federal government’s relationship to its most powerless citizens. There is no better example that reflects the sense of neglect that many African Americans felt during the presidency of George W. Bush than the mismanagement of the Hurricane Katrina crisis. While images of Black people wading in waist-deep water, rowing boats through city streets, camping on rooftops, and stuck in the squalor of an un-air-conditioned Superdome filled the news for days, the president of the United States remained on holiday, quietly secluded at his 1,600-acre ranch in Crawford, Texas. He waited until August 31, two days after the hurricane hit New Orleans, before finally halting his twenty-nine-day summer vacation. On his way home to Washington, a White House photographer snapped a photo of President Bush peering out the window of Air Force One, examining the ruins of the devastated Gulf Coast like an emperor surveying his destitute peasants beneath him. The image stuck. When Bush finally showed up on the scene on September 2, he walked into an airport hangar in Mobile, Alabama, and held a press conference. Surrounded by white men who did not reflect the vast majority of the victims in the disaster, the president indulged in a moment of gratuitous praise for his own team leader. “And Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” Bush told Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown. It was as if Bush had learned nothing from his famously failed “M
ission Accomplished” photo op on board the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in May 2003, when he prematurely declared, “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” As Michael Brown stood in khaki pants and white Oxford shirt listening to Bush’s praise, it felt as though the president had been completely oblivious to the national mood. Ten days later, Michael Brown resigned in disgrace.
Bush was not the only elected official guilty of heaping praise on undeserving colleagues. When CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, while on location in Waveland, Mississippi, interviewed Democratic Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu via satellite in Baton Rouge, he asked her if the federal government bore responsibility for the Katrina crisis. Landrieu unsuccessfully tried to deflect the question. “Anderson, there will be plenty time to discuss all those issues about why and how and what and if,” she said. Standing in a dry parking lot, she glibly rattled off a list of politicians from both political parties she wanted to thank “for their extraordinary efforts” and was about to praise Congress for taking action. Anderson Cooper couldn’t take it any longer. “Excuse me, senator, I’m sorry for interrupting. I haven’t heard that because for the last four days I’ve been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi, and to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset.”
Cooper was right, and many of those people were African American. I was one of them, and I cheered at the television as the CNN anchor spoke truth to power. “Finally!” I screamed at the TV. It felt like a pivotal moment, the first time I could remember a television journalist dressing down a politician on live television for reciting anodyne talking points in the face of crisis. Landrieu’s assertion that “there will be plenty time to discuss all those issues” was a classic and cowardly political deflection. Whenever there was a mass shooting, a white domestic terrorist, or a national tragedy that did not lend itself to a convenient political explanation, cautious politicians would demand time before commenting on the assignation of blame or appeals for justice. But they did not exercise the same restraint when faced with other crises that allowed them to engage in quick, demagogic solutions.
Black Americans did not need time to determine whom or what to blame. After centuries of watching the nation’s leaders neglect, disrupt, and destroy our communities, the pattern was all too familiar. Two weeks after the storm hit, a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found six in ten Black people blamed race for the federal government’s slow response in New Orleans. In stark contrast, only about one in eight white respondents believed the government responded slowly because the victims were Black. For African Americans, both in and outside the region, the pain felt personal and familiar. When the same consortium conducted another poll four weeks later, it found 63 percent of Black respondents feared for their lives during the hurricane, compared to only 39 percent of whites. More than half of Blacks in the area also reported that they had gone without food for at least a day during the storm, while less than a quarter of whites had the same experience. Black residents were also far more likely than white residents to report that they had been worried about an elderly relative during the crisis. Once again, a major tragedy in America had disproportionately impacted Black people, and once again, the nation found itself divided about the impact of race.
Four days after Katrina struck New Orleans, NBC aired a hurricane relief telethon, featuring musical performances and celebrity appearances to help raise money for victims. During one segment, film star Mike Myers looked earnestly into the camera and read a script to viewers explaining how the breach of the levees in New Orleans had changed the landscape of the city “dramatically, tragically, and perhaps, irreversibly.” When he finished his lines, his partner on stage began to speak. “I hate the way they portray us in the media,” Kanye West said. Myers turned abruptly to West, clearly noticing that the rapper had gone off script. “If you see a Black family, it says they’re looting. If you see a white family, it says they’re looking for food,” West continued. His words tumbled out after that, as he began to ramble about a number of issues, including his own sense of guilt for shopping instead of donating. At the end of West’s unscheduled, one-minute speech, Myers attempted to return to the script, hurrying through his remaining lines without addressing West’s remarks. “The destruction of the spirit of the people of southern Louisiana and Mississippi may end up being the most tragic loss of all,” Myers said. But when it came time for West to speak again, he blurted out the now famous words that would come to haunt the White House: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.”
The producers quickly cut the segment. They switched the camera to comedian Chris Tucker, who was clearly not prepared for the early handoff. But it was too late. Kanye West had already spoken and articulated what Black Americans had been saying all across the country. We had been complaining about the dueling media narratives of Black and white hurricane victims and the demonization and criminalization of Black poverty. The persistent and inescapable televised images of Black suffering caused by the storm had opened an unhealed wound for our people, just as the Flint, Michigan, water crisis would do a decade later, once again reminding us that our lives are disposable in the eyes of the larger white society. Kanye West’s extemporaneous candor, no matter how untimely or inelegantly presented, had its desired effect. It prompted yet another national conversation on race and stamped a brand on the president that would remain for the duration of his tenure in office. As Bush would later acknowledge in his 2010 memoir, Decision Points, the accusation of racism directed at him during the Katrina crisis “was the worst moment of my presidency.”
It hadn’t always been that way for George W. Bush. When the Texas governor secured the Republican nomination for president in 2000, he portrayed himself as a “different kind of Republican” who had worked successfully with Black leaders in his own state. He was following the playbook of Bill Clinton’s handlers, who had depicted him in 1992 as a “different kind of Democrat” who had worked successfully with Republicans in Arkansas. Both Bush and Clinton were all too familiar with the baggage that their party identifications carried, and they made efforts to distinguish themselves from some of the more polarizing leaders of their respective parties. During the Clinton presidency, Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich shut down the government in 1995 and 1996 and impeached the president in 1998. But George W. Bush tried to send a different and less divisive signal.
You could feel the difference when Bush walked on stage in a Baltimore convention hall in July 2000 to speak to the NAACP. He entered the room with NAACP President Kweisi Mfume, NAACP Chair Julian Bond, and NAACP Chair Emeritus Myrlie Evers-Williams. Bush politely shook the hands of the officials on the dais, received a standing ovation as he was introduced, and had the political savvy to begin his remarks with self-deprecating jokes to soften the crowd. Although he faced a mostly Democratic audience, he did not hesitate to describe the tension in the room. “I recognize the history of the Republican Party and the NAACP has not been one of regular partnership,” he said. This was not entirely true. The NAACP was founded, in part, by Republicans in 1909. But that was a different Republican Party that could still claim close ties to the leaders who fought to save the union from the Confederacy. Bush acknowledged this reality in his speech when he admitted that “the party of Lincoln has not always carried the mantle of Lincoln.”
For a moment, it seemed as if Bush got it. “Discrimination is still a reality, even when it takes different forms,” he said. Black Americans had never stopped saying this, of course, while much of white America, including Bush’s own party, pretended that racism had ended with the passage of civil rights laws and the accomplishments of a few high-profile Black Americans. But Bush sounded different from other Republicans that day. “Instead of Jim Crow, there’s racial redlining and profiling,” he said. “Instead of separate but equal, there is separate and forgotten,” he added. The Texas gov
ernor promised the NAACP that “strong civil rights enforcement” would be a “cornerstone” of his administration.
The most obvious problem with Bush’s promises, and those of other Republicans who sought the White House, was that the Grand Old Party remained stubbornly opposed to all new civil rights laws to protect African Americans. Virtually any civil rights legislation designed to end racial discrimination was deemed unnecessary, at best, or “reverse discrimination,” at worst. Even as Republican Party leaders paid lip service to historic civil rights legislation, as they did with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Republican-appointed judges were laying the groundwork to vitiate the law.
This contradiction would become apparent in the midst of the Katrina crisis, on Saturday, September 3, 2005, the day after Bush visited Alabama, with the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Having recently nominated John Roberts to fill the seat for retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Bush renominated Roberts for the new opening to replace Rehnquist as chief justice and later nominated conservative Samuel Alito to replace O’Connor. These two justices would soon join more senior Reagan-Bush appointees—Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas—in striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act in the 2013 case, Shelby County v. Holder.
It would not matter that the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act was signed into law under President Bush after an overwhelming and bipartisan vote in the US House of Representatives and a rare unanimous vote in the Senate. Bush’s own judges would strike down a critical enforcement mechanism of the very same civil rights law that he would sign. What had once been a central juxtaposition for Republican presidents in the nineteenth century had returned again for Bush in the twenty-first century: a Republican president who publicly claimed to support civil rights laws had appointed judges who ruled against those very same civil rights laws.