Amazing How Forwarded E-mails Travel

Trying To Make It Right

by Donna Ladd, Jackson Free Press
Photo Courtesy of Dr. Ricky L. Johnston
September 28, 2005

The e-mail about the Jackson doctor came all the way from Canada. Hollis Brown, a singer/songwriter in Saskatchewan, wanted to know if an e-mail he had received, calling New Orleans evacuees in the Astrodome ungrateful “n*ggers,” had really been written by Dr. Richard L. Johnson of University Medical Center. “It sounds like some KKK Krap if you ask me,” Brown wrote.

The e-mail he had pasted indeed had Johnston’s signature, including a Woodland Hills address and his home, cell and pager numbers. It was long, supposedly written by someone who had volunteered at the George R. Brown convention center in Houston.

The author described his supposed experience among “ordinary Houstonians” the Saturday after the hurricane, giving out cold water, sub sandwiches and clothing to the evacuees getting off the buses from New Orleans. They were rude, he said. They wanted sodas rather than water, McDonald’s instead of Jason’s Deli, beer and liquor. “They refused food and laughed at us,” the volunteer wrote. “They treated us volunteers as if we where SLAVES (sic).” They said things like, “Ya Cracker, you got a home we don’t,” he wrote.

Then: “I saw only ONE white family and only TWO Hispanic families. The rest were blacks. Sorry 20% to 30% decent blacks, and 70% LOSERS!!!!” He added, “I would call them N*GGERS, but the actual definition of a n*gger is one who is ignorant, these people were not ignorant… they were ARROGANT A**HOLES. The majority of which are thugs and lifetime lazy ass welfare recipients.”

Dr. Richard Johnson, a Vicksburg native and Mississippi State grad known as Ricky, did not answer his home phone when I called. Instead, a recorded message explained that he had just copied the post off a Web site and e-mailed it to friends—with his e-mail signature typed at the bottom. I left a message.

Johnston called back the next day, eager to set the record straight. “I definitely wouldn’t do it again,” he said. “It was a mistake, a lack of judgment. My intent was not malicious, not to promote racism. I’m not a racist.”

Since he hit “send,” the doc has been hearing from people from all over the world. Many people are distressed that he might have written such a thing—which is similar to other false blame-the-victim urban legends circulating the Internet since Katrina—while others are calling to congratulate him. “Many said, ‘Way to go, Man,” Johnston said.

The doctor said he originally saw the posting on a Myspace page that at least looks like it belongs to a young Syrian libertarian in Houston. Indeed, the posting dated Sept. 4 is still on that site, and www.snopes.com (the urban-legend-buster site) says someone answering to that name claimed the original posting and maintains that it is true. (Read about this urban-legend e-mail here.)

The hard question is why Johnston copied the shocking post and pasted it into e-mails to about 20 of his friends. He told his friends: “It’s long, but worth the read. Pretty sickening attitude and I hope not representative of all of those who were evacuated.”

Johnston said, in the Katrina aftermath, he was tired of “watching the big race issue get made over and over and over. I don’t think it was a race issue; it was a poverty issue.” Then he saw the post. “I couldn’t believe it,” said Johnston, who offered that he is Republican. “It made an interesting point about the mentality of groups that have been given things their whole lives and don’t have the impetus to do anything different.” He passed it on without confirming it. “I should have, in hindsight. I was just so overwhelmed when I read it.”

He said that the author’s “objective observations” seemed important: “I think there’s probably a degree of truth to it. Whether it’s relevant or not is the question.” Johnston had volunteered to help evacuees in a free clinic at the Mississippi Coliseum, many of whom were black, and had “wonderful experiences.”

Dr. David Hilfiker, an M.D. who moved his family to the inner city of Washington, D.C., to work with the poor, was also shocked when he read the e-mail, which I sent him after hearing him talk about “Seeing Poverty After Katrina” the Sunday before on NPR’s “Speaking of Faith” program. Hilfiker said by phone that the e-mail is “pretty virulent stuff.”

“He’s talking about a person being ‘objective’,” he said of Johnston, “but goes down to the shelter and didn’t have any of those experiences. I’m no psychologist, but we’re clearly talking about people with certain predispositions to believe such things. If you don’t understand how deeply your attitudes have been shaped by underlying centuries-old racism of this country, you think that what you’re seeing, you’re seeing objectively; in fact, you’re filtering through these old stories.”

Hilfiker, the author of “Not All of Us Are Saints: A Doctor’s Journey with the Poor” and “Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen,” used the e-mail as an example of how people are taught to believe the worst about poor blacks—especially since the Reagan ‘80s when political strategists promoted mythologies about “welfare queens” and the breeding of inner-city “thugs” to gain racist votes.

“A marked war on the poor has been carried out largely for political reasons that has spread so that most of the information, most of the stories support these stereotypes. Most people see what they’re ready to see,” he said.

Hilfiker, who started a center for homeless men with AIDS, said poverty is both a class and a race issue. “You’re right; it is both. … There is a great deal of classism going on. I don’t think the classism approaches the virulence of racism.” He warned about today’s sneaky race coding. “People who are supporting the wealthy people, who believe the function of government is to take money from the poor and give to the wealthy, are quite consciously manipulating these images. That is a class phenomenon, but all the code is about race.”

Even the anger at the alleged lack of gratefulness—in this case from people who likely had been ignored and stranded for days in New Orleans, stepping over dead bodies and scrounging for water—fits the pattern, he said. “If you go a couple layers deeper, people who are very poor and who are in a lot of pain don’t always act the best. People who are not poor and in a lot of pain don’t always act the best. I don’t know whether the e-mail has any truth to it at all, but clearly, the guy is expecting to be so overwhelmed with appreciation within the first two or three bottles of cold water he gives out. When he doesn’t get that, it apparently reinforces all of his preconceptions.”

These preconceptions, which lead to uninformed stereotypes and ultimately anti-poor and racist policies, result from people who simply do not know enough about the plight of the poor. “People can be highly educated, but most of us middle-class white people have zero contact with people who are poor, especially poor and black, Hispanic, minority. All we know is what we know. We don’t have any first-hand experiences,” Hilfiker said. That problem is compounded by increasingly re-segregated schools and children growing up without any contact with people in different socioeconomic classes, he added.

“These are really deep issues. Unless you live in pretty close face-to-face relationships with people who experience the other side of life, you’re just not going to get it. The issues are too deep; you are not going to learn about it in a course on racism,” Hilfiker said.

But try we must, he said. “What’s important is that you start where you are. If that means going down to a soup kitchen once a week, serving soup and not saying anything for 10 weeks until you’re ready, that’s a good place to start. One of the best things to do for people who are kind of scared of this is to get them working with kids from the inner city. Suddenly finding out what’s happening to children through no fault of their own will change you quick. It does take consciously putting yourself in a situation with face-to-face relationships, but you don’t have to live in the streets with them.” He said of the poor, “ultimately we’re not going to fix any of this until we are inviting them into our neighborhoods.”

To fix the problem, he emphasized, it is helpful to “take the blame out of racism”—and realize that susceptibility to racist stereotypes isn’t just about old KKK-type behavior.

“I had to recognize that I don’t have to be a bad person to be racist; I don’t have to intend to be racist. Just by growing up white in this culture, I am going to be racist,” Hilfiker said.

Dr. Johnston—who loves the diversity of living in Jackson and hates the suburbs—said his 15 minutes of fame is giving him pause, and making him think. “I don’t want to run. I want to stand up and admit I make a mistake and try to make it right,” he said.

The full e-mail is at jacksonfreepress.com.