San Diego Is Not All White And Rich!

I am sick and tired of San Diego county being generalized as all white and rich and favored by the government.

San Diego is being reported as having special treatment as opposed to Katrina because apparently we San Diegans are all white and rich!

...hold on...Okay I'm back, I went to go look in the mirror. Not rich and white.

...hold on...Okay I'm back, I went to go check my myspace friends. Not rich and white.

I am not going to analyze two very different tragedies. Yes, many rich whites have been affected and treated much better than blacks in Katrina. But this is another side of the story.

La Jolla, Rancho Bernardo, and a couple other places are very wealthy in general, and mostly white. However, my hometown Escondido and a lot of other San Diego towns are full of lower class people--not just of color, but white too!

And surprise surprise, we did not all come here to live in pools of money isolated by rich landscapes for the effect. Too many of us are here for the same reasons as you are there.

I have to write this, I owe it to all of my friends from high school, to my loving parents, and to everyone who does not fit the San Diego "lifestyle" according to the rest of the country.

Yes, most houses that were consumed were in rich areas--but houses aren't the only issue. The smoke is everywhere. Business has stopped all over. Too many of my people have lost their jobs for a week, too many are out of school, and too many cannot afford this temporary setback. There's more I'm probably forgetting too.

This is a shout out to everyone, white or black or Latino or Asian or Native American or Middle Eastern, and more. To those who are not rich. To those who do not deserve to be singled out by other communities of color.

As one anonymous comment stated in response to the Too Sense post:

"...the Katrina experience was a national disgrace; however, your attempt to draw this black and white paralllel is simply not in concert with the facts on the ground. You needed to do some more local research before you set this to print."

My heart out to Katrina, of course, but let's not advocate for some people of color at the expense of others.

And let's not forget that not all whites are rich and everything.

I apologize for the more informal rage of this blog--not because it is considered informal by our Eurocentric standards, but because I fail to oppose those standards in my other blogs by taming my rage and forging it into formal-sounding pieces.

I am so conflicted.