Yet, Ford opines, if West himself decided it was unsafe to drive his own car to the crime-ridden area, and made sure enough it was squirreled away in a parking lot that was "safe," how can he then charge other people — the cabbies, who also do not want to venture into such a neighborhood, with racism, when he, a black man, is manifestly guilty of the same fears they are — motivated by crime, not race?
And, aside from the more nebulous claims of racism on the individual level — be it celebrity or anonymous plaintiff, Ford also delves into the "big issues," like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which let a social disaster follow a natural one, and which displayed unadorned racism of the old sort, wherein a white couple pictured with stolen goods was captioned to elicit sympathy while a black man was captioned to elicit a fearful reaction. He writes:
The black guy is a looter, a gangbanger, a stone-cold Crip out for an easy score. Isn't that a boom box in his hand? Oh, wait, it's a pack of diapers. The white couple: Jeannie and Jean Valjean, driven by adversity to take a loaf of bread, no doubt to feed their small children who are, unfortunately, just outside the frame. I bet they even left their names and telephone numbers and a note apologizing.
Yet, Ford does not concur, and ends the digression on Katrina like this, after discoursing on his claim of "racism without racists":
New Orleans' black residents suffered as a result of racism — the racism that established black segregation and a crippling cycle of poverty. They also suffered because of the shortsightedness, neglect, and government incompetence that made the aftermath of Katrina worse than it had to be. It's natural to want to hold the available blameworthy parties responsible for all of these evils. But most of the racists responsible for the distinctly racial cast of the Katrina disaster are dead and gone.
And it is just such a rapier, and its wielding, that separates Ford from both lesser thinkers and writers, whether or not one believes President Bush is a racist — passive or not, nor whether there are other incidents in the President's life that might support such a claim. Ford's point is that Katrina alone may have just been an Occam's Razor example of the President's overall incompetence, not any deeper bigotry.
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