There is a huge and disturbing article by A.C. Thompson in The Nation. It concerns an incident you may have heard of, the treatment of African Americans after Katrina, specifically in a New Orleans suburb called Algiers Point. His description of The Point is pretty accurate; I know people who live there:

The Point, as locals call it, is a neighborhood within a neighborhood, a small cluster of ornate, immaculately maintained 150-year-old houses within the larger Algiers district. A nationally recognized historic area, Algiers Point is largely white, while the rest of Algiers is predominantly black. It’s a “white enclave” whose residents have “a kind of siege mentality,” says Tulane University historian Lance Hill, noting that some white New Orleanians “think of themselves as an oppressed minority.”

In this seven-page piece Thompson is one of the first in the media to approach a story that locals have been aware of for some time. I was in exile after the storm, having run the day before when I saw footage of the Cajuns leaving (a sure sign to get out for any local), but I know people in The Point and I know someone who stayed. Their stories agree with a lot of what Thompson has to say. They all tell stories of Caucasians with guns hunting down African Americans. This quote from Wayne Janak, a 60-year-old carpenter and contractor speaks volumes:

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 p**sy community.”[profanity redacted -Loki]

This is the sort of thing that inspired my earlier post about race in the city. While Janak is a transplant to the New Orleans area, his neighbors and community are not. The support from the local community that these “hunting parties” seemed to enjoy is profoundly disturbing. Decorum prevents any personal comment here….

People in other parts of the country ask me how I feel about all the negative headlines about racism and corruption that have come out of my area since the storm. I usually reply that I’m glad to see a spotlight thrown on these matters. The more aware the public is the better chance we have of stamping this sort of primitive behavior out. In that vein I am incredibly pleased to see this story starting to take off.

Big Red Cotton, a blogger for NOLA.com, has also caught wind of this story and offers blistering commentary of her own in a piece entitled “White New Orleanian Brags About Shooting Blacks During Katrina; “If it moved, we shot it!” I highly advise reading both the article in The Nation and Big Red’s response from the ground here in the city. She has some interesting theories about how this also ties in to the current plague of death that stalks our streets here in the murder capital of America. [All emphasis in the following quote is hers, not mine. -Loki]

Donnell Herrington was one of the Black men shot that lived to tell about it. You might recall Herrington recounting his experience in Spike Lee’s documentary “When The Levees Broke.” He and his cousins were on their way from their home in Algiers to the ferry where the National Guard set up an evacuation point when he was shot. After recovering from the near fatal shooting, he paid a visit to the Fourth District police station whose officers patrol the west bank. He says the officers he spoke with failed to take a report or check out his story.

And although Herrington’s story, as well as accounts from the militia that Cox News heralded as “the ultimate neighborhood watch,” were reported nationally, The NOPD nonetheless issued a statement in response saying “we absolutely have had no complaints to substantiate any of the claims made in that article.”

There is a eight-minute video version of this story on The Nation’s YouTube Channel here. Go watch it, but make sure you have a strong stomach. The language is not safe for work and the sight of people barbequeing and drinking beer while they cheerfully toss off quotes like the ones above is unsettling to say the least.

Get some insight into things–go check out Thompson’s and Big Red Cotton’s articles. If we are going to step into the future we need to be aware of the prejudices of the past that retard our progress.