Talk Race, But Don't Play Race Card With Katrina

LOS ANGELES--Five days before Hurricane Katrina struck, 100 people gathered at a local Catholic Church in eastern New Orleans. They were there to talk about the city's astronomically high rate of poverty. This was not a gathering of academics, local and state officials or business leaders. They were community residents, welfare recipients, ex-offenders and anti-poverty activists. Most of them were black.

Many of them did not have cars, and had to take buses to get to the meeting. That wasn't unusual. Nearly one out of three New Orleans residents doesn't have a car. The participants had a deep sense that they were in a race against time to do something to combat the looming poverty crisis. The poverty rate for young and old in New Orleans was double and triple the national average. Nearly 100,000 households were eligible for federal Earned Income Tax Credit, but had failed to take advantage of it. Nearly 60,000 children were eligible for a health care program for low-income families, but were not enrolled in it. The city's poor had grown more numerous and desperate than ever.

The times over the years that I have visited friends in neighborhoods away from the glitter of Bourbon Street, the French Quarter and other tourist spots of New Orleans, I have been struck by the dire poverty, the legions of panhandlers and homeless persons on the streets, the large number of abandoned buildings and the pock-marked, unkempt streets and sidewalks in poorer neighborhoods. New Orleans was indeed the classic tale of two cities: one showy, middle-class and white, and the other poor, downtrodden and largely low-income and black. It was a city that didn't wait for a disaster; its grinding poverty and neglect had already wreaked disaster on thousands.

Katrina only added to the misery. What happened next was predictable. Federal bumbling, bungling and cash shortages turned relief efforts into a nightmare. That virtually guaranteed that some blacks out of criminal greed and others out of sheer desperation or panic would take to the streets in an orgy of looting and mayhem. Equally predictable was the way some state and federal officials and some in the media would respond. They instantly branded the looters "animals," "thugs" and even "cockroaches." Though it wasn't said directly, some state officials inferred that soldiers should shoot to kill to restore order. That would turn New Orleans into a war zone, and as in any war, those who are hurt the most are innocents. It would further embed the image of New Orleans blacks as lawless and undeserving of any sympathy and support.

It was even more predictable that some black leaders would accuse city officials and President Bush of racism in not responding fast enough to the crisis. Certainly city and state officials must take some heat for the chronic neglect of the New Orleans poor. And Bush must take heat for the severe cutbacks that crippled FEMA's ability to speedily manage, coordinate and fully fund disaster efforts. Bush's singular obsession with the war on terrorism has resulted in the radical shift of millions in money and personnel from disaster relief to Homeland Security. That shift in priorities further hampers federal efforts to deal with disaster relief.

The comments on some black Web sites pulse with speculation that the continual TV shots of blacks running wild in the streets are orchestrated to ensure that as little as possible will be done to aid New Orleans blacks. That kind of talk smacks of defeatism. If one screams racism and deliberate neglect, and then when it happens, screams "I told you so," it can become a grim, self-fulfilling prophecy.

A heavy-handed rush to paint the tragedy of New Orleans as yet another terrible example of the black-white divide in America does a disservice to all the poor and needy who are suffering. Yes, a majority of them are black, but many of the victims are white, too. Such remarks stir fear, anger, and latent racism in many whites. It stirs the same fear anger, and racial antipathies among many blacks.

The poor of New Orleans need massive aid, long-term relief, and the continued goodwill and sympathy of the nation to put their lives back together. They also need a sustained public effort to lobby the Bush administration to drastically up the ante on the paltry and embarrassingly low $10.5 billion that it has pledged for Katrina disaster relief. That's less than it costs to bankroll two months of the Iraq war. But turning the monumental tragedy in New Orleans into racial one-upmanship piles one tragedy on top of another.

PNS contributor Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst and author of "The Crisis in Black and Black" (Middle Passage Press).

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