Comedian Carol CarterA Florida Republican party board member took calls for her resignation over a flagrantly racist email as an opportunity to demonstrate her profound dull-wittedness. Any doubts about executive committee member Carol Carter’s prejudices were erased in her unapologetic apology.
It started when Carter sent this unfunny email to “less than a dozen” people through her personal account. At least one of them forwarded it on and it ended up with the party’s state chair and the media.
“I’m confused. How can 2,000,000 blacks* get into Washington, DC in 1 day in sub zero temps when 200,000 couldn’t get out of New Orleans in 85 degree temps with four days notice?”
Well gosh, Carol, I’m confused too. Maybe it’s because black people only want to get off their asses for a party? And they are too lazy to walk out of New Orleans with the clothes on their backs to go god knows where? What’s your explanation, Carol?
Before she resigned, Carter followed up the e-mail with an apology, but added in the message, ”I do hope that we are going to be allowed to keep our sense of humor.” Later in a telephone interview, she said she regretted that the e-mail became public because she realized it “could be taken as very racial.”
”I would never take something like this to the media,” she said. “It’s like what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”
In one fell swoop Carter blamed whoever leaked her little joke to the media, insulted everyone who saw this as the stunningly hateful and snide remark it was fully intended to be (which evidently includes people in her own inner circle), lashed out at the leaker, and used bad grammar. The word is “racist,” honey, not “racial.” The fact that you don’t know the difference is part of the problem. You’re one of those idiot white people the rest of us blush over.
Speaking of turning red, no doubt that’s what Jim Greer, Florida GOP chair, did when he found out about Carter’s missive. Greer serves on the transition team for Michael Steele, the Republicans’ first black national chair.
* Let’s all buy into the idea that Obama is only the president of black people, shall we?
This new revelation brings to light an embarrassing truth about the contemporary Republican party, that is, that it’s ranks are flush with white racists. In fact, many whites vote Republican solely because they are racists.
I was reading about the nursing home owners who were charged with murder after Katrina in “Best Crime Reporting 2007″ that 65% of those that died in Katrina were over 65 and 40% were over 75% which I guess the Republican Party finds simply Hi-Larious.
I am sadden by this public officials remarks …But I am not surprised.
The ignorance and class racism of the Republican Party NEVER ceases to amaze me . . . it’s plain to see why they WANT “education funding” cut . . . seems the smarter you get, the greater the odds of voting Democratic . . . unless you get a MBA, then you go “Wall Street” on us and become a stark raving Republican . . .
First it was not a Joke but an ironic question that requires thought! Something lacking in many of the posts I have seen on line.
In reading the text of the email forwarded by Carol Carter I find it a very good question with many possible answers. Many of these answers need to be brought to light for their elements of truth. Truths that while embarrassing to some are never the less truths that are distorted for political reasons.
Truth one: Both the outgoing administration and the incoming administration cooperated to insure these 2 million visitors did not have problems in visiting Washington D.C. They did a spectacular job and need to be commended. This is a positive as it shows that the incoming administration has many good people who can get things done.
Following from the above, the former administration did not have a problem managing this volume of visitors to D.C. and it’s the same administration that was blamed for the problems in New Orleans. This I believe is the thrust of the “Confused” Email.
When you read more into what was intended in the email you expose your bigotry and ignorance.
There were many failures in New Orleans many of which took decades to manifest. These failures of education both public school and news media created conditions that led to the debacle in New Orleans.
The two million BLACK visitors to Washington did not suffer for decades under the conditions that eliminated their social conscience. They cooperated with and supplemented the support offered by authorities. This is my take on the “truths†in the confused question.
The answer is at least a two party system with a strong and HONEST news media. This was lacking in New Orleans and the lesson should be to not let that happen anywhere else.
Jeff, Your core facts are just wrong, and what you’ve written here just compounds the racism of Carter’s email and the conservative movement in general.
The crowd of two million at the inauguration was not all black. Not hardly. If you look at the coverage, blacks weren’t even a majority. I doubt a third of the crowd was black. Even if every African-American resident of DC showed up, they only comprise 55 percent of the total population of 600,000, or 330,000.
Furthermore, the inauguration was not managed by the Bush administration. The event was managed by the Congress, under Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and Obama’s Presidential Inauguration Committee.
Plus, there were problems with crowd control. Thousands of people were stuck in pedestrian tunnels under the mall for the entirety of the ceremony. From anecdotal coverage I’ve seen, the folks in the “purple tunnel” were mostly white.
The systemic problems in New Orleans are rooted in the racism of the white people who ran the city in the 1960s and 1970s. These folks made a choice not to educate the black children, but rather to set up a private school system for whites. That decision produced an uneducated underclass 20 years later, which in turn drove businesses away from New Orleans — which increased and entrenched the poverty of its residents.
Conversely, at the same time that NOLA was perpetuating Jim Crow, Charlotte — a city with the same population — led the country on integration by being first to institute busing and guaranteeing educational opportunities for all children. Did Charlotte’s leaders do this because they were big ol’ liberals? No. They did it because they were burghers — business is job one in Charlotte. The city also set it up so that it would train people through its community college (CPCC) for any new corporation that chose to move its operations to the city.
As a result, Charlotte is a prosperous city with a relatively affluent African American middle class. It is also the headquarters city for dozens of corporations, including Bank of America, and, until the current debacle, Wachovia.
Even before Katrina, not one — zero (0) — national or international corporation had its headquarters in New Orleans. Why? It’s a famous city with tremendous amenities, so you’d think any corporation would want to be associated with it. The problem is, the blue collar workforce, both black and white, is uneducated, and the white collar work force is too scarce.
But to the larger point, it is a racist construct to suggest that blacks behave differently in crowds from people of other races. Poor people lived in the Ninth Ward because it was under the levy so the land was cheap. The race of those poor people is irrelevant.
Katrina was the signature failure of the Bush administration. No amount of historical revisionism by Republicans over the next few years is going to change that.
But we know you’ll keep trying…
Hey Jeff, the lady herself said it was her idea of a joke. You’re so busy trying to glamorize racism into political incorrectness that you missed her point. Man, it must be really hard to be wrong all the time.
Jon,
I live in the New Orleans area and I agree with most of what you’ve written except to say that the reason New Orleans has not prospered was the perception of corruption that outsiders had of the city. It was believed that you had to “pay” to “play” in New Orleans. The state of Louisiana’s tax structure also did not favor businesses, especially when compared with adjacent states. Also the city is mostly surrounded by water and marsh so there is little available land for development. When taken all together, these drawbacks are considerable when viewed by corporations located elsewhere. I also would not agree that the city’s workforce is “uneducated”. I’ve been to Charlotte several times and ran into some pretty “uneducated” people. I think the public school systems nationwide are on the skids. What else can be expected after 8 years of attempts to undermine public education with voucher systems?
Hey Jon, until Garryinnola commented, I missed the part where you said there were no national HQs in New Orleans before Katrina. I still have fond memories of Maison Blanche before it sold out, and spent entirely too much money there. Also, at one time Jax Brewery was the country’s tenth largest. I’m sure there are lots of other examples (Ruth’s Chris?), not to mention N.O.’s importance to the U.S. economy as a successful port city.
The type of companies I’m referring to are large employers — 500 to 1,000 or more employees. Maison Blanche and Jax were regional. (Ruth’s Criss, oddly enough, is hq’d 100 miles from you in Heathrow, Fla.)
North Carolina’s population has more than doubled since I moved away in 1985 — it’s bigger now than New Jersey — because cities like Charlotte have aggressive, longstanding economic development programs that focus on, among other things, educating their workforce.
New Orleans is as infamous in economic-development circles for not being able to provide people in sufficient numbers to run data centers etc. as it is for corruption. New Orleans is sustained by the port, the oil industry and tourism, but even before Katrina it was not competitive with, say, Jacksonville or Tampa, in attracting expanding and relocating companies.
Garry, I apologize if what I wrote gave the impression that I believe everyone is New Orleans is uneducated. I do not. I love visiting the city. I have lost some great memories there. And, as the saying goes, some of my best friends are from there, and they are all better educated than I am.
But I was a kid in the Charlotte suburbs when the local leaders decided to educate everyone via forced busing, and I remember that New Orleans was one of the cities in the Deep South whose leaders dug in their heels and fought integration with everything they had. Unlike Charlotte, New Orleans already had a private school system in place via the Catholic Church. The white and affluent black kids went to those schools, leaving the public schools comparably unsupported. That decision 40 years ago created, or at least majorly contributed to, the downturn in economic development, which caused the corporate tax base to shrink. Without corporate tax revenue, education suffered and the infrastructure collapsed.
I don’t mean that Charlotte is perfect. It is famously a bit cold-shouldered and soulless, which is something New Orleans is not. It is also true that Charlotte has more than it’s share of dumbasses. But it competes in economic development with cities twice its size, like Atlanta and Dallas, and the general consensus is that the root of that competitive advantage is its trainable workforce.
Jon,
I appreciate the clarification but consider this also; A sense of history can be instructive and Charlotte wasn’t even a crossing-on-the-crick when New Orleans was a cosmopolitan city. New Orleans is nothing if not resilient. While inland cities such as Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth and, yes, Charlotte might be dynamic, growth centers now, that is only because we have had an era of cheap, plentiful energy. In an era of expensive energy of unreliable supply, compact cities located along navigable waterways will have the edge once again. Empires rise and empires fall and so do cities. In 100 years New Orleans may well be underwater but if it’s not, I’ll bet it will be doing better than Charlotte or any of the other inland Sunbelt cities that are bastions of smug self-satifaction today.
Garry, my intent was not to give offense to New Orleans, and I’m genuinely sorry that I did. It is my life goal not to live anywhere in the United States east of La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles. However, for what it’s worth, if I were to move back to the South, I’d rather live there, with all its problems, than Charlotte, my hometown.
The real point here is that Carter’s email suggested that the victims of Katrina were stranded because they were black. My thesis is it was racism, not the victims’ race, that was the genesis of the crisis.
I think it’s an objective fact that New Orleans has been the victim of political malpractice, especially including corruption, by its leaders over the years. I also believe the crisis after Katrina illustrates why educating everyone is a practical idea, not just liberals’ desire to hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.”
I used New Orleans and Charlotte to compare and contrast this idea because they had roughly the same population and both had to make tough decisions about busing in the 1960s. But there are many other examples, including one recently here in California.
In 1994, California conservatives almost succeeded in making it illegal for the government to provide education and health care to the children of undocumented Latinos. Prop 187, which passed overwhelmingly (with 59 percent of the vote) in the election but was overturned in court, would have created an underclass of hundreds of thousands of uneducated folks, the oldest of whom would be entering adulthood this year.
Since many of the mothers of these children worked as maids and nannies in middle class homes, preventing the children from receiving medical attention would have also created the ideal environment for an epidemic that could have spread like wildfire up the social strata.
Charlotte’s leaders made a business decision to educate everyone in the 1960s and 1970s, but in the 1980s, they made a horrendous choice not to build a mass transit system. I was living there then and was involved professionally in a small way in civic affairs. The unspoken motive in this decision was racism. Middle-class Charlotteans then viewed mass transit as just another entitlement for blacks. (”I can’t afford a maid,” one woman told me, “so why should I pay for a light rail. Let Myers Park pay for it.”)
The current leaders of Charlotte are making another horrible decision at the insistence of Northern transplants who don’t want their children to take buses to school. They are disassembling the integrated school system that is the very foundation of the city’s success.
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