The victims, they note, were largely black and poor, those who toiled in the background of the tourist havens, living in tumbledown neighborhoods that were long known to be vulnerable to disaster if the levees failed. Without so much as a car or bus fare to escape ahead of time, they found themselves left behind by a failure to plan for their rescue should the dreaded day ever arrive.
“If you know that terror is approaching in terms of hurricanes, and you’ve already seen the damage they’ve done in Florida and elsewhere, what in God’s name were you thinking?” said the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. “I think a lot of it has to do with race and class. The people affected were largely poor people. Poor, black people.”
… Among the messages and essays circulating in cyberspace that lament the lost lives and missed opportunities is one by Mark Naison, a white professor of African-American Studies at Fordham University in the Bronx.
“Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws?” Mr. Naison wrote. “If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions.”
—From the Margins of Society to the Center of Tragedy, New York Times
A Mindful Life / Kathryn Harper
express : discover : renew : create
I’m sorry to be argumentative, but something strikes me as odd.
That is that there’s nothing — well, very little — in the article about the poor non-black people of NOLA. Did they survive proportionally better than the poor black people? The article doesn’t say. My hunch is that they didn’t, and this has much more to do with being poor than being poor and/or black.
It’s true that the current administration and the current crop of GOP leadership seem to think that mitigation isn’t worth the investment. We’ve got that going on in spades here in Washington right now. But when the next big earthquake hits Seattle and flattens the Alaskan Way Viaduct, there won’t be anything in the papers regarding how it was a crime against black humanity that this didn’t get handled. Yet, if that does occur, it will be ultimately because of the same root suspicion of emergency mitigation.
I think tying this catastrophe to racism is a mistake of the highest order and will hamper mitigation efforts in the future.
Well, Chad, I merely posted an excerpt of an article that reflects a question I’ve privately asked and an observation I’ve made as I watch the news and see photos of refugees. There is, to my thinking, very real evidence of a class divide that is also racial. The region has a not insignificant black population: 32% in Louisiana, 36% in Mississippi, according to the 2000 Census.
In 2003, these states had an 18% poverty rate. Sixteen percent of Louisiana and 18 percent of the Mississippi population are in poverty according to the 2004 Census Bureau report. I’d wager the majority — not all, but most — of them are non-white.
It is a crime against humanity that the situation is being poorly handled, and in this region, the unfortunate majority suffering is black. The potential for disaster to New Orleans and the Gulf region has existed since the region was established. People with money and power settled and built it anyway, using slave labor in the beginning. Civil rights weren’t established until the 20th century, so there remains a significant population that historically has been struggling and disenfranchised. I’ll bet the people with power and money in this region are mostly white. And they are the ones who had the means to evacuate.
The fact is, the poorest people usually live in the riskiest, starkest locations. In this case, the poorest people are mostly black. In another location, that population could be Hispanic, or white, or Asian. If observing the situation as it is in MI and LA is “tying it to racism,” so be it.
I don’t think it is so much “tying it to racism” as it is observing that it is, once again, the poor who are getting the worst end of things. Those who have the least losing the most. To me, it illustrates the huge divide between the have’s and the have not’s in this country. And that is the crime.
“I’ll bet the people with power and money in this region are mostly white.”
I might just take you up on that bet. While as you noted that a third of the state is black, the city of New Orleans is two-thirds black.
I’d agree with the assumption that the white people in New Orleans are disproportionally better off than black people, but since there is quite a lot of money floating (pun not intended)around in New Orleans and only a quarter of the city’s inhabitants are white, that doesn’t add up in my head to a de facto fiscal apartheid.
I think it’s more accurately about poverty. The affected people in Mississippi are generally white and poor, according to what I’ve learned. They’re being ignored just as much, if not more, by the federal gov’t. Bush will be flying over them on his way to & from NO today.
Well, you got me. I’ll go hang my head in shame now, I would have likely lost that bet.
But that being said, I still think the Katrina-related problems have more to do with poverty than blackness.
Good show on your part.
I agree with all of you that poverty is the overriding factor. Those with no money are most vulnerable and last remembered. I just find it interesting to examine the distribution across race and to explore its implications.
For anyone reading this post who hasn’t read the follow-up to which Chad refers, you can see it here.
Thanks, all! This seems to be an intelligent discussion. Re: rescue attempts in New Orleans, I’m thinking that the general public, assumes that Gulf relief efforts are 1)organized and 2)timely. I can’t speak for the people in the area, surviving in poor squalid conditions–I don’t know their ‘mindset’ right now.
Perhaps, they are acting out, in ways that they see fit.
Our society is not inclusive (nor tolerant) of all people.