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"When you break up, your whole identity is shattered. It's like death."
- Dennis Quaid
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"By any means necessary."
- Malcolm X
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"When our memories outweigh our dreams we have grown old."
- Bill Clinton
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"Of the Catholic church he worked for peace, reconcillation, and disarmament.
- Göran Persson
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Dream Hampton
Blacks in the Gulf Coast sought refuge, but were met with resistance and violence by neighboring whites. Dream Hampton considers how bleak a picture that paints for race relations in America--and what it says about being black, post Hurricane Katrina.
Jefferson Parish, the county that supported Klansman David Duke, when he ran for governor of Louisiana, borders the Ninth Ward--a neighborhood I've seen only in Juvenille videos. Survivors tell of flood victims seeking higher ground, trying to enter Jefferson Parish. They say they were greeted by dogs and rifle-brandishing vigilantes, who called them "looters" and fired shots above their heads while demanding that they turn around and face the floods on foot. A friend of mine, writer/activist Asha Bandele, visited Algiers Mississippi (which also borders Jefferson Parish), where she met a local black man, who showed her a body that was, yes, bloated from the flood but was remarkable because of its bullet hole. The National Guard refused to allow the community an opportunity to bury the body. (This was not because they planned to investigate the shooting, but because there was no lime to cover the corpse.)
Given their historically bloody track record, I expect nothing more or less from white people in AmeriKKKa. I expect them--as we wade in water above our shoulders--to criminalize us, to accuse us of wanting to steal their flat-screen TVs. I expect them to turn the dogs, which have been trained to attack black men by scent, on us. I expect them to treat our bodies like so many heaps of trash, in need, not of a proper burial, but stench control. I don't just expect this of racist whites in some parish that supported David Duke--I expect this of them all.
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