Those who experience historic events directly have their own unique memories of those events. As a historian I know the limits of memory and am wary of it. For what its worth these are my memories of Memphis at the time of troubles that reached a climax with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
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It is difficult to believe that forty years have passed since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., April 4, 1968. On that spring evening in Memphis a news bulletin on television stopped me as I was heading out the door. I was on my way to hear Dr. King speak to a group of striking garbage workers and their supporters. Martin Luther King Jr. was dead, the city of Memphis was placed under immediate curfew, and rioting erupted across the nation.

It was not just an important moment in history, but both the culmination and a turning point in the civil rights movement. It was part of a long and difficult struggle for human dignity in Memphis. And it was a significant part of my education.

Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis because after months of struggle the garbage workers of the city had called on him for help. In late January Memphis sanitation workers had gone on strike. They were looking for basics: a living wage, a chance to shower after the day’s work before heading home, a chance to eat lunch away from the garbage, and may most importantly to be treated like human beings.

When the strike began a call for help went out to both white and black Memphis. Each night supporters and strikers gathered at churches in the black community. There were prayers and speeches, and the singing of hymns, often the great black spirituals. A collection was taken for the workers and people were urged to bring food and clothing to the next rally. This went on night and after night into April.

For a young white Yankee college history teacher living in the South for the first time it was a learning experience, a crash course in Southern culture, both black and white. For two hours almost every night I was immersed in black culture. I was struck particularly by the dignity and kindness of those struggling people who were exploited by a system that did not recognize them as equal members of the human race. The love and compassion in the midst of struggle and suffering warmed those churches even on the coldest of nights.

I was amazed by the contrast within the lily-white community on the eastside of Memphis where I lived. My neighbors were filled with fear, especially as the strike went on and the street demonstrations began. Many armed themselves convinced that the black hordes were ready to descend on them. The differences between these two worlds in which I lived and moved always surprised and sometimes shocked me.

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Need to celebrate or drown your sorrows? Take The Wire food quiz

First, if you don’t know “Sheeeet!,” you don’t know … well, you haven’t been following the best show on television.

Whether it’s the best television show of all-time … that is a matter of fierce debate in critics’ circles. Check out this enlightening exchange between Alan Sepinwall (The Newark Star-Ledger), Andrew Johnston (Time Out New York) and Matt Zoller Seitz (The New York Times). Johnston argues for The Sopranos, Seitz for Deadwood and Sepinwall for The Wire — but they all admit The Wire holds its own.

In any case, the series finale is here — and many of us are in panic mode, wondering what the future of television might be like beyond the streets of Baltimore. Whether it’s sparking a conversation about masculinity, the media — or something inbetween — it has never failed to deliver on both a literary and a raw emotional level.

And it’s not just me talking.

The reaction to the final season, however, has been surprisingly mixed, to say the least. For a positive take on this season, see The House Next Door. For a more sober assessment, see David Zurawik of the hometown Baltimore Sun (which — and I’m not accusing Zurawik of bias here — has been mocked incessantly on the show this season) or Ross Douthat of The Atlantic. Or check out this debate between Dan Kois and Adam Sternbergh of New York magazine.

I happen to think that while the show made its various allegories a little too explicit this season, it worked as a climatic crescendo to what has been an incredibly patient and subtle show over the years. The show’s unflagging criticism of both personal and collective corruption is now blatantly obvious, I admit, and McNulty’s fake serial killer scheme does strain the very disciplined realism of the show. But it is the reactions of the media and the mayor to McNulty’s scheme that bring the show back home.

Those reactions, even though they are laughable and outrageous, feel undeniably true. That’s exactly how a modern for-profit newspaper and an idealistic but inevitably political politician would respond to the sensationalist opportunity that McNulty delivers to them. Yes, it’s over-the-top, but have you watched a 24-hour news channel lately when it’s got a celebrity scandal/scandalous murder to latch onto?

Whatever one’s thoughts are toward this final season, as the finale approaches it’s time for celebration and appreciation.

For a celebration, how about some crab cakes — Baltimore-style. Get the recipe here (or try yellow pepper coulis). Thanks to the the Raleigh News and Observer — which also created the definitive Wire food quiz (pdf).

Better yet, if you are near Baltimore, hit some of the show’s favorite bars.

Putting aside food and drink, you might enjoy BET’s Top 10 Wire Moments and other fun stuff.

For an appreciation, beyond reading the critical appraisals noted above, let’s leave it to David Simon, the show’s creator, who recently held forth on The Wire — its take on journalism and its roots in everything from Greek tragedy to Stanley Kubrick.

Most importantly, though, let’s give Simon and the other minds behind the show a final chance to remind us that for all its literary greatness, it’s a show very much based in a reality that persists and that we must fight to change. In their humble opinion, that means rejecting, among other things, the so-called war on drugs.

After humanizing a part of America that had been dismissed or forgotten by media and popular culture, after representing what many thought was unrepresentable, in this election season they have my vote.

We’ve posted a ground-breaking article today in the magazine: “Haunting Our Homes: Nightmares of Gentrification” by Sam J. Miller.

The article discusses the ways in which the modern horror film — and specifically, the subgenre of the haunted house film — acts as an allegory of gentrification and all the class and racial, public and private dilemmas it brings:

The modern haunted house film is fundamentally about gentrification. Again and again we see fictional families move into spaces from which others have been violently displaced, and the new arrivals suffer for that violence even if they themselves have done nothing wrong.

This thriving subgenre depends upon the audience believing, on some level, that what “we” have was attained by violence, and the fear that it will be taken by violence. In the process, because mainstream audiences are seen as white, and because gentrification predominantly impacts communities of color, the racial Other becomes literally monstrous.

Read the full article here.

Why would it take a presidential debate directed by African Americans and focused on issues of particular concern to African Americans to ask the questions that everyone should be asking of the presidential candidates?

Well, it’s because race still matters in America. It’s the single greatest factor dividing America, and as a result, it’s the best site from which we see how inequality — in all racial, sexual and economic forms — is defining America.

In that context, we shouldn’t be surprised that the first “All-American Presidential Forum” last Thursday on PBS, moderated by Tavis Smiley and centered around the 10 issues expressed in The Covenant with Black America, was so successful — so revealing and meaningful.

Bill Richardson, in response a question about poverty and education, said it was the first time in the multiple debates they have had that any of the candidates had been asked formally about educational issues.

Smiley told Maryland professor Sherrilyn Ifill, “Tonight, we asked 9 questions — this was the first time I’ve heard the candidates asked about Darfur and about Katrina. That was the point of tonight.” Check out Ifill’s live debate analysis at blackprof.com (a not-to-be-missed site, by the way, for accessible but informed cultural and political analysis).

We also shouldn’t be surprised, though, that many of us didn’t even know the debate was happening. Some PBS stations showed other programming — and the mainstream media almost completely ignored it (although, it should be noted, everyone can still catch the PBS webcast).

We just don’t like to talk about issues that force us to face the uncomfortable realities of America — especially when they deal with race.

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Women at the Kentucky Derby are supposed to be sipping mint juleps under their big hats, right? Well, even though the Kentucky Derby is steeped in tradition — an old-fashioned Southern tradition, in fact — women have been breaking through the glass gates for some time now — as owners, trainers and, yes, jockeys. The most recent female jockey was Rosemary Homeister, Jr., who rode Supah Blitz in the 2003 Derby.

Still, even though girls much more than boys seem to attach themselves to horses and horse-riding at early ages, professional horseback riding is certainly a male-dominated sport. Homeister was only the fifth female jockey to ride in the Derby since Diana Crump became the first in 1970.

Larry Muhammad of the Louisville Courier-Journal recently wrote about Cheryl White, “America’s first female black jockey” — who, despite her many awards and accomplishments, has been largely overlooked by history. White, now 53, is a racing official in California.

“I think if she’d been given the opportunities that women are just now starting to get, she would have blown them all out of the water,” said Tina Hines, publisher of FastHorsesMagazine.net.

Hines had tracked White down and wrote about her career in March after rediscovering a 1971 issue of Jet magazine with White on the cover.

Speaking of history, Richard Crepeau several years ago wrote this timeless reflection about Kentucky Derby tradition — and how so much of our culture is reflected in the hoopla surrounding what has become known as the greatest two minutes in sports.

In Abe Aamidor’s recent article in the Indianapolis Star, Robert Thompson, the you-got-a-pop-culture-article-I’ve-got-a-quote-for-you professor from Syracuse University, makes this statement about how “Ugly Betty” isn’t really such a radical show:

I’ll believe this when someone makes a TV show or movie about someone who is really ugly …. Yes, she (Ferrera as Betty Suarez in ‘Ugly Betty’) is not as beautiful as Charlie’s Angels, but she’s not ugly. I think she’s kind of cute. She’s also engaging and articulate.

Another local woman agrees: “They make her look dorky, not ugly.”

I would respectfully disagree. I think the show goes to great lengths to make Betty look rather ridiculous at times. Yes, she’s endearing — but that doesn’t change how different she looks from anyone else on television.

A legitimate criticism might be that the show still needs to place her amongst beautiful people at a fashion magazine — and that her appearance is more a source of comedy than critique.

But that criticism is muted by the fact that much of the show takes place in her exceedingly ordinary (if you can say a working class Latino family on primetime television is ordinary) home.

Last month marked the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the 10-year anniversary of President Clinton’s signing of the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act, better know simply as welfare reform. Poverty and renewal were, once again, hot news topics. The most revealing story, though, is this country?s persistent lack of commitment to helping those in need — much like President Bush’s fleeting flirtation with confronting the poverty of New Orleans with “bold action.”

Welfare legislation radically changed the nation’s welfare program for families which had begun in 1935 along with social security. Modeled after states widows pension programs and spearheaded by FDR’s key advisor Harry Hopkins, the legislation clearly broke with the idea that combating poverty was the province of private charities and states and localities.

It was bitterly opposed not only by conservatives but also by charities and social workers who argued that federal involvement would make welfare a “right” and reduce the likelihood that the poor would adopt the moral values and work habits to raise themselves out of poverty.

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The wonders in the information age never cease. I am about to quote at length from an insightful piece of cultural criticism I just ran across at The American Enterprise Online. It appears that the mouthpiece of the famously conservative organization is giving a little ideological leeway to its columnists.

How else to explain that they are publishing something that asserts a work of modern American pop culture has redeeming social value?

The subject of praise is the new film Little Miss Sunshine, which has opened to consistently great reviews. Eric Cox in his review does what more cultural critics should be doing — analyzing the film in its full social context:

The Hoovers aren?t meant to be a genuine representation of life in America?neither is the film interested in mocking the bourgeois American family. On the contrary, Little Miss Sunshine targets the notoriety- and sex-obsessed culture that tells the Hoovers they are all, to use Richard?s vocabulary, ?losers.?

They aren?t rich, famous, or attractive. They haven?t broken the law or done anything else worth being interviewed on television about. They?re normal. Average. Unexceptional.

Even Frank, the nation?s leading Proust scholar, is upstaged by his arch-rival, Larry Sugarman (Gordon Thomson)?the nation?s second-leading Proust scholar?whose book on the acclaimed but little-read French novelist becomes a New York Times bestseller and enables Sugarman to buy a new sports car.

In that single subplot, the movie manages simultaneously to satirize the dumbing-down of high culture, the obsession with conspicuous consumption, and the intellectual pretensions of the American upper-middle class.

Similarly, in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant?which itself suggests the superficial competition implied by the American preoccupation with ?keeping up with the Joneses??the movie parodies the sick sexification of children brought to light a few years back by the lurid murder of JonBenet Ramsey.

You might think it?s impossible to exaggerate the grotesqueness of that phenomenon, even for purposes of ridicule, but the film?s raucous climactic scene manages to do it in a way that is both shocking and hilarious.

Cox’s willingness to break down the allegory he sees is noteworthy. Manohla Dargis in The New York Times makes a shorter reference to the film being “a surprisingly sharp look at contemporary America, one that sets the metaphor of the stage (and, by extension, competition) against the cherished myth of the open road.” I think I know what she is getting at, but I’d rather hear her broader ideas than her breakdown of the action and performances. For that, I should — and certainly will — be seeing the film myself.

My mother taught me a lot of things, only some of which I listened to. But you can bet I always abide by her #1 rule of shopping.

Which is why loved Sweatshopper.org’s new Walmart Tour podcast (via Marketplace). On it, artist Kris Hall takes you on a realtime tour of her local Walmart, guiding you in seeing the legions of security cameras, encouraging you to stop and think about the textile workers who make the $1/yard fabrics in the back of the store, and helping you buy a gun. I’m not really doing justice to the awesomeness of the podcast — it’s creepy and funny and gave me shivers in a few places, and I already thought I knew how bad Walmart is. Just download it to your mp3 player, drive to the parking lot of your local Walmart, and hit play.

While you’re on the way, you may also want to think about the recently released report by the AFL-CIO which details the ways in which the happyface people are happyfacedly weakening port security post-9/11 so as not to interfere with their profit margin. Here’s Evan from Peek:

The sickest part? The cost of all this security would come to a measly one-third of 1 percent of Wal-Mart’s $11.2 billion profits (that’s PROFITS) from last year. Or less than CEO Lee Scott’s compensation over the past couple years.

But you can get a toilet brush for freakin’ $2.99 so I guess it’s a wash.

Bonus: Ready for a little subversive action against mass consumerism? Vote for Veronica Arreola to win the “Swiffer Amazing Woman of the Year” Contest (yes, barf), and you not only stick Swiffer with a feminst activist & scientist whose husband does the housework for a spokeswoman, but you send $5K to WIMN, a most excellent grassroots media justice organization in great need of the funds.

So. Today?s the 33rd anniversary of Roe and not only are we still fighting to defend the damn thing, we?re seriously on the verge of losing it.

It?s half past time to take the gloves off, kids. The wingnuts did a long time ago. They both call us murderers and murder us with alarming alacrity.

My immodest proposal? A name change.

Are we ?pro-choice?? Sure. But so are Verizon and many school districts. When a word becomes associated with frozen dinners, it may no longer be the powerful political tool it once was.

So ask yourself: what is it you are really standing for when you stand for the right to legal, safe, affordable and available abortion? If you?re like me, you?re standing for the right for a woman to do whatever she damn well pleases with her own body and her own fertility. We?re not just standing for reproductive choice. We?re standing for reproductive freedom.

And what are we opposed to? What would those fetus-poster-wielding-murderers like to see? It?s not just the abstract, soft-focus opposition to our having a ?choice.? Let?s call it like it is: They want to force us to have babies we don?t want.

That?s called forced pregnancy.

Now, ?forced pregnancy? isn?t a new term, either. It?s used by the UN to describe ?the unlawful confinement of a woman forcibly made pregnant, with the intent of affecting the ethnic composition of any population or carrying out other grave violations of international law.?

It?s also beginning to be adopted by some pro-Roe forces, and for very good reason: it fits like a love glove.

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The final weeks of 2005 marked a period of fervent reading, if not fervent posting. Time to honor the resolution of writing more frequently in 2006. But first, a brief review of bits of culture that came to an end.

A moment of silence, please, for the death of ?the old Mainstream Mass Culture,? which gave way to the rise of ?new, fragmented technoculture,? and, more importantly, the ?empowerment of the American consumer ? which isn’t quite the same as the American citizen?; ?the beginning of the end of serendipity,? thanks to that ability to customize culture; and don?t forget the mainstream media itself.

Farewell to great TV theme songs — and the formely reasonable expectation that you?ll know everything about a TV character if you watch every episode.

Goodbye to Renee Graham, who ended her ?Life in the Pop Lane? column with a look back at memorable moments of 2005 and ?those folks who through their remarkably stupid, illegal, and publicity-hungry actions made writing this column so easy for the past six years.?

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Update 10.07: The Washington Post reports that the unfounded rumors of violence in New Orleans probably slowed down aid from coming into the city.

I guess we would call that a very sad example of real life imitating art — or at least the fictional narrative that the media constructed and that the rest of America ate up. If anyone doubts the power of the racism that subtly and silently undergirds many of our cultural conversations, this should put that myth to rest.

I’ve been reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with my students over the past few weeks. I cannot help but see how it speaks to the latest news out of New Orleans.

Conrad’s story is a tale of a European man, Marlow, making a trip up the Congo River during the height of Belgium’s imperialist project in the late 19th century. He sees himself as entering the “heart of darkness” — a place of savagery that has degraded and ruined at least one other European man, Kurtz.

While the novel is certainly a damning critique of King Leopold’s genocidal methods and a more universal exploration into the “darkness” that is part of every human soul, it is also a tale of entrenched prejudice and blindness.

Marlow, despite his often enlightened introspection, represents the native Africans as little more than savages, at home only in the “wild and passionate” jungle and out of place in the “civilized” world. Although he admits repeatedly and obsessively that he cannot “see” into the jungle and, presumably, into the individuals lives and societies that populate it, he never questions the “truth” of his representation.

It appears as if the 21st-century American media works from the same imaginary premise and has been infected, even more unexcusably, with the same systemic blindness.

Almost all of those reports — about the rapes, murders, shootings and riots in the Superdome, the Convention Center, and on the streets of New Orleans in the days following Hurricane Katrina — well, uh, how do I say it?

They weren’t true.

Yep — no kidding — they were made up. They were lies to feed the media frenzy.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune has done amazing work in cataloging and contextualizing all that it and others got wrong.

What is most remarkable as you read through the list is the massive distance between the truth and reality

“I think 99 percent of it is bulls—,” said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. “Don’t get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn’t see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. … Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved.”

And to say race didn’t play a role in the coverage would be perpetuating another kind of blindness.

The Los Angeles Times offered a shorter report on the latest revelations, but it includes a revealing interview with Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss:

Amoss cited telephone breakdowns as a primary cause of reporting errors, but said the fact that most evacuees were poor African Americans also played a part.

“If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle class white people,” Amoss said, “it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering.”

David Carr’s piece in The New York Times, “More Horrible Than Truth: News Reports,” doesn’t make such a pointed critique, but the stories speak for themselves:

”I talked to a friend and, after the flood, they heard on the radio that a gang of 400 armed black looters were coming over the bridge to Hanrahan, where he lived,” said Ken Bode, a professor of journalism at DePauw University and a former correspondent for NBC. ”He and his neighbors were sitting in the street with guns and they decided to load up all they could and caravan out. He said the looters never got there because the National Guard turned them back.”

There was no band of looters coming their way.

“There is a timeless primordial appeal of the story of a city in chaos and people running loose,” Carl Smith, a professor of English and American studies at Northwestern University and the author of Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief, tells the NYT. Urban chaos narratives, he adds, offer “the fulfillment of some timely ideas and prejudices about the current social order.”

The best antidote for this disturbing media mea culpa might be taking refuge in honesty — an admission of our own prejudice and how it shapes our behavior. In the Times-Picayune report, for example, a National Guardsman experiences a productive cognitive dissonance about those “thugs” he had heard about:

As the authorities finally mobilized buses to evacuate the Dome on Sept. 2, many evacuees were nearing the breaking point. [Maj. David] Baldwin said soldiers could not have controlled the crowd much longer. They ejected a handful of people attempting to start a riot, screaming at soldiers and pushing crowds to revolt.

“We’re not prisoners of war - y’all are treating us like evacuees and detainees!” he recalled one of them shouting.

But many others sought to quiet such voices. On the deck outside the Dome on Sept. 1, the day before buses arrived, preachers took it upon themselves to lead the agitated crowd in prayer and song.

“Everybody needs to help the soldiers,” Baldwin recalled one of them saying. “We’re all family here.”

About 15 others joined the medical operation, as people collapsed from heat and exhaustion every few minutes, Baldwin said.

“Some of these guys look like thugs, with pants hanging down around their asses,” he said. “But they were working their asses off, grabbing litters and running with people to the (New Orleans) Arena” next door, which housed the medical operation.

If only more of us could step through the mediated jungle we live in and emerge on the other side — in the light of day.

The New York Times‘ Week in Review section featured a terrific cartoon by Dan Wasserman that shows the media “rediscovering” the poor. Magazine cover stories abound, from Fortune’s “Temp Jobs: Can You Ever Have Too Many?” to Food & Wine’s “All-Purpose Flour: The All-Purpose Food!” Meanwhile, a television announcer promotes a new series, Lifestyles of the Poor and Anonymous.

And it’s not just the media.

“All of a sudden the poor have emerged from the shadows of invisibility, lifted onto a temporary pedestal by natural disaster. Whether it is because of guilt, pity or the nation’s generosity in times of crisis, those who lost everything — many of whom had little to begin with — find themselves in a strange wonderland of recognition,” Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher wrote in a Washington Post front-page story last week that detailed how relocated Hurricane victims were being offered jobs, financial support and attention that is rarely paid to the poor — creating a dividing line between the poor themselves.

The destitute people sent fleeing by Katrina have been offered free housing, free clothing, free cars, free toys, special admission to universities and preferential job treatment. Athletes come to them , bestowing jerseys and autographs. Entertainers sing for them, and Bennigan’s restaurants here and in Houston announced Katrina’s kids could eat without paying for a while.

This is what it’s like for the celebrity poor, a new subculture created by Hurricane Katrina. [...]

How far this compassion should extend — and what it should look like over time — is looming as the next great social policy debate. What began as a response to the most devastating hurricane in the country’s history is segueing to a grander discussion about the treatment of those who live on the margins.

I wouldn’t say that the “celebrity poor” are a completely new subculture. Our cultural texts — novels, films, etc. — have long attempted to bring the plight of the poor into our consciousness. Unfortunately, while texts like Les Miserables, The Jungle and The Grapes of Wrath (to name a few oldies but goodies) had good intentions — and at times even forced changes in social policy — they relied upon a glorification of the poor to make their point, making it easy for the broader public to see them as charity cases rather than human beings.

And while mainstream hip hop in the present-day (both in music and film) claims to speak from the street, it is frequently riddled with stereotypes of the poor that that are then used as justification for their marginalization.

The paucity of exceptions to these two extremes of representations, of course, proves the rule — but the exceptions also point to a cultural path for redemption. Like a Dickens serial novel from the 19th century — but with much more complex characters — HBO’s The Wire patiently but persistently reveals the many sides of life for the poor in Baltimore — their desires and disappointments. In other words, it shows their full humanity.

Underground hip hop, of course, has served as a vital correction to its mainstream brethren. For a recent example, check out “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” — the latest track from The Legendary K.O. — in which we see Hurricane Katrina through the eyes of the disregarded.

In discussing the cultural response to Hurricane Katrina, John Leland also mentions Marquise Lee, a freelance video producer, who heard the song and created a video using scenes of African-Americans in New Orleans, images of the president and scenes from one of Kanye West’s video. “It was a first-person account of the struggle — ‘Come down and help me,’” said Lee.

Also in the Week in Review (yes, it’s filled with good stories), Leslie Kaufman notes that the United States is about to embark on a social experiment: “Will moving the poor out of New Orleans help them rise?”

Social scientists are interested in collecting evidence on whether relocation is sound public policy. Two previous small-scale relocation programs mentioned seem to indicate that the poor will do better if they’re separated and scattered among communities with lower concentrated poverty levels. They may, however, end up concentrated together under FEMA’s plan to house evacuees of New Orleans in trailer park encampments.

“Politicians of all stripes have already condemned this plan, fearing that the trailer camps will become ‘FEMA ghettos,’ economically and socially isolated from communities and jobs,” writes Kaufman, adding:

Of course, the New Orleans diaspora of the poor may pose other challenges - like political disempowerment. And while the poor may become less visible, their problems don’t disappear, said Margaret Simms, of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a research group based in Washington.

“Circumstances that make people poor — like low education and chronic disabilities — don’t disappear when you move them someplace else,” she said.

Nor when they reach celebrity status.

It’s hard to see the news channels continuing their fascination with a segment of our population that executives don’t see as a very profitable demographic, but it’s not much of a stretch to imagine the reality TV possibilities of tracking one family given a voucher to start over in a middle-class suburb and another assigned to living in sub-standard conditions.

Plus: “The Week in Television” notes that new sitcom My Name is Earl “about a low-life seeking redemption” was a hit for NBC.

While enjoyable on many levels, the first episode of Earl unfortunately relies on playing up the stereotypes of the working class and poor — often for satirical effect — rather than breaking them down. Earl and his brother, even though they are “good guys,” lack intelligence and common sense. And while both of them overcome their homophobia by the end of the first episode, the basis of that homophobia is never really questioned — and the stereotypes of gay men, on a side note, are never complicated.

And if the $100,000 winning lottery ticket seems like a stretch, remember that when it comes to poverty we always like to think there’s an easy way out.

There’s more good coverage today of the difficult questions we face in Katrina’s aftermath. Last night, whether it was the BBC or MSNBC, reporters were finally describing what we were seeing: victims of Katrina who are “largely black and poor.”

This New York Times story by David Gonzalez, “From Margins of Society to Center of the Tragedy,” features criticism from black leaders and others discussing the perils of race and poverty.

Among the messages and essays circulating in cyberspace that lament the lost lives and missed opportunities is one by Mark Naison, a white professor of African-American Studies at Fordham University in the Bronx.

“Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws?” Mr. Naison wrote. “If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions.”

And Joan Walsh of Salon describes the media’s emotional response to the deplorable conditions and our own frustration as witnesses to the breakdown in New Orleans:

The nightmare in New Orleans has a lot to tell us about poverty: the desperate poverty of the city’s African-American population, of course, but also the poverty of political debate in the U.S. today. The crisis unfolding before us — dispossession, looting, people shooting at rescue workers, the president’s dim response, and now, people dying in front of our eyes outside the Superdome — rubs our noses in so much that’s wrong in our country, it’s excruciating to watch. But I’m especially struck by the inability of our existing political discourse to describe, let alone to solve, the intractable social problems that have come together in this flood whose proportions and portents seem almost biblical.

Continue reading here.

*cross-posted from msmusings.net

Frustrated at the news coverage of Katrina on Monday night, Bernie wrote about the two things missing most: “The context that no one dares report is that this is about race and class.” It’s something that’s been bothering a lot of us who are trying to make sense of the images we’re seeing and the narratives that are constructed.

Over at Slate, Jack Schaefer asks the same questions and responds with some apparently provocative ideas (see reader reaction) as to why the majority of the media isn’t discussing what is obvious to anyone watching.

Race remains largely untouchable for TV because broadcasters sense that they can’t make an error without destroying careers. That’s a true pity. If the subject were a little less taboo, one of last night’s anchors could have asked a reporter, “Can you explain to our viewers, who by now have surely noticed, why 99 percent of the New Orleans evacuees we’re seeing are African-American? I suppose our viewers have noticed, too, that the provocative looting footage we’re airing and re-airing seems to depict mostly African-Americans.”

If the reporter on the ground couldn’t answer the questions, a researcher could have Nexised the New Orleans Times-Picayune five-parter from 2002, “Washing Away,” which reported that the city’s 100,000 residents without private transportation were likely to be stranded by a big storm. In other words, what’s happening is what was expected to happen: The poor didn’t get out in time.

Even the mention of class and race is enough to throw some readers into a flurry. On the Slate message boards, the piece has been dismissed as “race-obsessed liberal commentary” and one poster suggests that Schaefer thinks Katrina itself was racist. What they refuse to acknowledge is they are participating in a long conservative history of denying race — which is of course intertwined with class — as a determining factor in American life. But Katrina exposed that perspective for what it is: a lie. Race matters. Often tragically so.

Update, Thursday evening: I should have also pointed to David Brooks’ history lesson in today’s New York Times about the “human storm” that has followed devastating hurricanes and floods in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

I just saw a new CNN graphic: The Race Reality of New Orleans, with demographic statistics. And NBC Nightly News correspondent Bob Faw tonight delivered a brief — but still noteworthy — report on Katrina’s effect on the haves and have-nots. It remains to be seen, though, if we’ll get much beyond the numbers, if we can stomach more intense, messy conversations about race as we consume a relentless diet of tragic images.

*cross-posted from msmusings.net