“It looks like the Houston and Galveston area has really lucked out,” said Max Mayfield, director of the hurricane center.

That came from this article about Hurricane Rita, and now we know for sure that racism played a factor in the paths of the hurricanes. Whites were spared in Texas; blacks weren’t in Louisiana. Racism.

Right?

No, of course not. It’s stupid. But if it weren’t completely ludicrous, and I mean completely, totally, absolutely, we’d all have to go through this.

I won’t go on and on. We all know the dialogue that’s been happening in the wake of Katrina, we all know we’ll have to hear about this for at least another year as if America in 2005 were the same as Alabama in 1950 or antebellum Dixie.

I figured out something about how the issue changes for liberals and non-liberals (not even conservatives. I know a lot of people that align with liberals on everything else but this). Or maybe I’d have to define the sub-set of liberalism even more narrowly: there are people who see racism everywhere (PWSRE) and people who don’t.

When something bad happens — change in the weather, change in the economy, change in the national rhetoric — that affects black people more than it affects non-black people, the PWSRE know that it is because of racism. The rest of us think that it might be racism.

I don’t discount that racism exists. I just think that its effects have been grossly exaggerated at the cost of accuracy, self-respect for blacks and whites and societal harmony. When Katrina hit and those left behind were overwhelmingly black, elderly, impoverished and/or infirm, the PWSRE knew that it was racism, and then went on from there. As always happens, when they had unfurled the banners, sounded the charge, gone trumpeting over several hills and then noticed that the whole country wasn’t behind them, they proclaimed that we were all racist, that we must want black people to die. It’s the kind of gross insult to our character (not to mention our intelligence) that we’ve gotten so used to hearing that we hardly notice anymore. “Yeah, okay. Whatever.” You can’t argue with people who are so far off-base, and so high on their own pure vitriol and passion that reason and rationality seem like distant stars.

But just for the sake of accuracy, I’ll say it here in my tiny little corner of thought: the reason everyone doesn’t agree isn’t because we don’t have eyes and hearts that work as well as their own. It’s because when we saw the outcome of Katrina we only thought that it might be racism. But when we thought about what else might be involved, we thought about what else might be a factor, we reflected on the dire and ever-present consequences of poverty for people of all races. (And thinking that, many of us didn’t blame George Bush or our government and we didn’t feel guilty for not being poor. There are always poor people. The Lord said we would have them with us always. )

We thought about how we’ve seen in many cities that the poor blacks and the elderly and infirm of mixed races tend to gravitate to certain neighborhoods — they segregate themselves, as blacks have been doing for some time, being mere human beings like those of other races that are reaffirmed the most by interacting with those of their own group. Not a very sophisticated human tendency, and one that whites work to overcome with varying degrees of success. But a common trait to all races in any case.

And if other people were like me, they also thought of people who are in a terrible situation and yet won’t yield to any attempts to bring them out of it. Those people (black and white) were still in New Orleans even after the evacuation of the Superdome and many had to be almost threatened before they would leave.

We thought of that and the many other ways that we’re all in this together. And thinking that, we went to work. We will again.