rhetoric of “god’s land”: more Tim Wise on Racism

(via Eric.) Tim Wise has a new essay up, available on his blog as The Ugly Side of Disaster: Racism and the Calculus of Comparative Suffering, or at Lip Magazine as Adding Insult to Injury: Race, Disaster and the Calculus of Comparative Suffering. An excerpt:

…there’s Rush Limbaugh, who has decided to use the flooding in Iowa not to demonstrate compassion, but as an opportunity to make derogatory statements about poor black folks: specifically those caught by the flooding in New Orleans after Katrina in 2005.

This week, as folks in Iowa, Indiana and parts of Illinois have watched flood waters rise ever higher, Limbaugh took to the air to contrast these supposedly good and decent people who have joined forces to help each other, with the presumably evil, lazy and violent folks of New Orleans, who we are told, did nothing but foment criminality and wait for the government to save them during flooding there in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Thus, we have his statement of a few days ago, in which he noted that in the midst of the devastation in the Midwest:

“I see people working together. I see people trying to save their property…I don’t see a bunch of people running around waving guns at helicopters. I don’t see a bunch of people running shooting cops. I don’t see a bunch of people raping people on the street…I see the heartland of America. When I look at Iowa and when I look at Illinois, I see the backbone of America.”

Wise goes on to show how the situations in New Orleans and the Midwest are not comparable (for a variety of factors), and how conceptions that New Orleans residents were more dependent on government welfare are just false: Iowans in two of the counties most hard hit by the flooding actually received similar amounts of, if not more, government assistance pre-flood than New Orleans residents pre-Katrina.