–his neighbors, under orders to preserve the flammable brush near their homes because it was the habitat of the “kangaroo rat,” lost their homes.
We’ve seen this phenomenon before. After an incident of Tennessee being “Flooded while white”, I mentioned that P. J. O’Rourke, attending a 1989 housing march in Washington, was asked by his wife
“Will there be lots of people from South Carolina at the housing march?”I said, “Huh?” “You know,” she said, “where Hurricane Hugo just destroyed everybody’s house.”
He explained that “there wouldn’t be any people from South Carolina in the march demanding houses from the government because the people from South Carolina were too busy building houses for themselves.”
***
I don’t believe that conversation actually happened, but still: good point.
You could still make commonsense, evidence-of-your-senses points like that in 1989, especially if you were PJ O’Rourke.
Now it’s 2011, and not even PJ O’Rourke makes points like that any more, with or without the imaginary straight-man contributions of his wife.
UPDATE: post-tornado looting worries in Minneapolis? That’s crazy talk oh wait…
We at SBPDL quickly consulted the famous Flickr map that shows the racial breakdown of the city, and as our hunch suggested, the area that required a “curfew” was one of the few locations where Black people reside in the city.
Then we decided to consult The New York Times EBT/ Food Stamp map. Guess what we found? Hennepin County (where Minneapolis is located) has a population with nine percent of the citizenry on food stamps. Two percent of white people are on food stamps. Forty-seven – yes 47! – percent of Black people are on food stamps. That Black people are roughly 13 percent of the county shows which group requires the bulk of the federal help when it comes to eating (not to mention the free lunch program for Black students).
