Elmer's Brother

from Opinion Journal
Perhaps the ugliest thing written in the wake of Hurricane Katrina was a post on the Puffington Host by Randall Robinson, a self-styled "social justice advocate," which appeared on Sept. 2:

It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive. Four days after the storm, thousands of blacks in New Orleans are dying like dogs. No-one has come to help them.

I am a sixty-four year old African-American. New Orleans marks the end of the America I strove for. . . .

My hand shakes with anger as I write. I, the formerly un-jaundiced human rights advocate, have finally come to see my country for what it really is. A monstrous fraud.

Robinson subsequently retracted the wildly implausible cannibalism claim (surely one of the most invidious antiblack stereotypes imaginable). But in a disclaimer atop the article, he writes that he "stand[s] behind everything else I wrote without reservation." Apparently that includes the statement that "thousands of blacks in New Orleans are dying," which is almost certainly (knock on wood) an exaggeration. According to the Associated Press, the latest death toll for the entire state of Louisiana is 423. (Granted, this isn't a final figure and is likely to rise.)

Robinson's views are extreme, and his way of expressing them particularly inflammatory, but as we noted yesterday, black Americans' views of racial issues tend to be sharply at variance with those of whites, and thus of the population as a whole. In a Gallup poll, 60% of blacks think that "one reason the federal government was slow in rescuing these people was because many of them were black." Eighty-six percent and (by our estimate) approximately 78% of the total population disagrees with this statement, for which there is no evidence and which is almost certainly false.

Of course it is human nature to empathize with people who are "like us," which is why people care more when a disaster strikes their country than a foreign land. Thus it's perfectly understandable that black Americans would respond with a heightened fervor to the sufferings of fellow blacks after Hurricane Katrina.

But it makes no sense to expect nonblacks to empathize with blacks because they are black. Transracial empathy must be based on what people of different races have in common: that we are fellow Americans, or fellow human beings. The use of a natural disaster as an occasion for racial grievance is a hindrance, not an aid, to national solidarity and empathy.

Robinson followed up his cannibalism post with a call for dialogue last Monday:

Long ago white America stopped talking to black America about what black America needed to talk about. Indeed, white America long ago stopped talking about what all of America needs badly to talk about--race, and the origins and causes, exceptions notwithstanding, of intergenerational white wealth and black poverty in America.

Perhaps now, we can begin to talk. Honestly for once. For the good of us all.

But if Robinson is willing to conclude--based on urban legends, rumors and his own prejudices--that America is "a monstrous fraud," what can there possibly be to talk about?