I live in Houston and I was here at the time when the evacuees flooded from NOLA to Houston. At first many of the people at my job were full of compassion for those coming in. Of course we are also in a place that's prone to hurricanes and we've been through some bad ones ourselves so we had a lot of sympathy/empathy for them.
I was working at a grocery store and a shoe store (2 jobs) at the time and we had red cross donation tins at the grocery store. A lot of the NOLA evacuees kept trying to steal the donations saying "this is for me right?" I told them it was supposed to go to the red cross organization and they should apply to them for help.
They had nasty attitudes, kept stealing from the store, etc. One time I had gotten a new roll of quarters for my till and I had to wait for the till to open to put it in, and one of them reached over the counter and grabbed it while I was trying to help him with his groceries. There was also bizarre behavior like buying a box of baking soda, emptying most of it into another container in their car, then coming back in asking for another one because they "Spilled it" by accident. The manager actually gave the guy another one for free. They also liked to cry racism at the smallest things like checking big bills for counterfeit, ID for alcohol and cigarettes, etc. That actually started to make me feel resentful of black people for a while which I'm ashamed of now but I just saw so much of the worst side of that culture that it created some bad feelings for me.
The evacuees at my other job would constantly try to steal shoes. Sometimes they would hit one of their kids to make them cry for no reason other than to create a distraction while the other person they were with stole shoes. They'd also come in together in large groups and spread out so our smaller staffed store couldn't keep an eye on all of them at once.
I didn't understand how they could be so ungrateful to the city who had opened our arms to them and given them safety when they had been forced out of their homes by the storm.
I was bitter and angry with them.
Over time things got better. Many eventually went back to NOLA. Those who stayed, were often the better ones and weren't the really bad troublemakers. It still really changed how I viewed New Orleans though.
Topic: What blacks did to other blacks during Hurricane Katrina (video) (Read 1328 times)