The Nation‘s A.C. Thompson wrote an account of white vigilante activities in Algiers in the days after Hurricane Katrina that must be read, if for no other reason than because no one else has covered it (or if the Times-Picayune did, I can’t find it on their Web site).

Pervel and his armed neighbors point to the very real chaos that was engulfing the city and claim they had no other choice than to act as they did. They paint themselves as righteous defenders of property, a paramilitary formation protecting their neighborhood from opportunistic thieves. “I’m not a racist,” Pervel insists. “I’m a classist. I want to live around people who want the same things as me.”

Nathan Roper, another vigilante, says he was unhappy that outsiders were disturbing his corner of New Orleans and that he was annoyed by the National Guard’s decision to use the Algiers Point ferry landing as an evacuation zone. “I’m telling you, it was forty, fifty people at a time getting off these boats,” says Roper, who is in his 50s and works for ServiceMaster, a house-cleaning company. The storm victims were “hoodlums from the Lower Ninth Ward and that part of the city,” he says. “I’m not a prejudiced individual, but you just know the outlaws who are up to no good. You can see it in their eyes.”

Since some of the people that were shot weren’t outlaws, it sounds like Roper’s not that good at reading eyes, or maybe he is prejudiced after all.

The story’s a brutal reminder of how nakedly Hurricane Katrina exposed the race issues New Orleanians and Americans would like to think don’t exist, and Obama’s election is only a small step forward. The story is also accompanied by a video and an editorial, the latter calling for:

Community groups should call upon Governor Bobby Jindal to lead a multiagency task force to get to the bottom of these crimes. In Congress, Representative John Conyers and Senator Patrick Leahy ought to make use of their subpoena power to get then-Police Chief Eddie Compass and then-District Attorney Eddie Jordan to explain their inaction; police officers posted in Algiers Point after the storm and the vigilantes themselves should face subpoenas, too. And it would be a fitting gesture if Eric Holder, once confirmed as attorney general, swiftly directed the Justice Department to open an investigation. If we as a nation are ever truly to transcend race, tolerance for racist violence in our midst must come to an end.