Most White Americans refused to attribute Katrina delays to racism.

Evidence

No one summed up the class racism of the government and media response to Hurricane Katrina victims better than Lani Guinier of Harvard Law School. “Poor Black people are the throw-away people. And we pathologize them in order to justify our disregard,” she said. And no one summoned up the raw feelings of antiracist Blacks better than the superstar rapper who had just released his second studio album, Late Registration. “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” Kanye West boldly stated, deviating from his script during a live hurricane relief concert on NBC on September 2, 2005. By mid-September 2005, the pollsters were rushing out to check the pulse of American racism. In one national poll, only 12 percent of White Americans—but 60 percent of African Americans—agreed that “the federal government’s delay in helping the victims in New Orleans was because the victims were black.” Presumably, the minds of 88 percent of White Americans and 40 percent of Black Americans—if the poll was representative—had been flooded by racist ideas. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1202

Categorization

• XREF: Guinier’s ‘pathologize to justify disregard’ is a crisp statement of the policy-first/causal-inversion thesis the reader is mastering.