The "us" in the U.S.

BushCo's response to Katrina speaks for itself. The question of whether the type of racism on display is deliberate or not is irrelevant. What's worse: treating certain people as inferior or as invisible? In any case, it could not be any clearer that Americans who live in poverty and have dark skin are not considered truly American.

On September 2, Bush stated that "now we're going to go try to comfort people in that part of the world." That part of the world? I didn't know that BushCo's efforts to turn the clock back to the 19th century involved reversing the Louisiana Purchase.

In April 2004, Bush, while justifying his democracy-at-the-point-of-a-gun policy, said:

There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily -- are a different color than white can self-govern.

As Robert Jensen notes:

It appears the president intended the phrase "people whose skin color may not be the same as ours" to mean people who are not from the United States. That skin color he refers to that is "ours," he makes it clear, is white. Those people not from the United States are "a different color than white." So, white is the skin color of the United States. That means those whose skin is not white but are citizens of the United States are ...? What are they? Are they members in good standing in the nation, even if "their skin color may not be the same as ours"?

This is not simply making fun of a president who sometimes mangles the English language. This time he didn't misspeak, and there's nothing funny about it. He did seem to get confused when he moved from talking about skin color to religion (does he think there are no white Muslims?), but it seems clear that he intended to say that brown people -- Iraqis, Arabs, Muslims, people from the Middle East, whatever the category in his mind -- can govern themselves, even though they don't look like us. And "us" is clearly white. In making this magnanimous proclamation of faith in the capacities of people in other parts of the world, in proclaiming his belief in their ability to govern themselves, he made one thing clear: The United States is white. Or, more specifically, being a real "American" is being white. So, what do we do with citizens of the United States who aren't white?

What do we do with them?
We let them drown.

These are the Bush Family Values.