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New Orleans: We are on our own
In the US, white people can't imagine black people who are just like them
Darryl Pinckney
Saturday September 3, 2005
The Guardian
There were a number of white looters involved in the LA riots, a fact ignored or suppressed a decade ago. And so, as a black viewer, I was relieved yesterday when Channel 4 News finally found a white face among the victims of Hurricane Katrina pushing shopping carts through the water. The woman insisted to the camera that it was the police themselves who had told people to go into stores and get what they needed. She hadn't taken any clothes, she said. She was surviving, not shopping.
The only other white faces I saw during the report were those of national guardsmen, pleading officials and helicopter rescue personnel. I was so busy hoping that the news would get across the commonality created by the emergency that I completely missed the point. There is a reason everyone whom reporters found on the beach front in Biloxi, Mississippi, was white and in some cases low-income: US-style residential segregation.
And there is a reason why the people left behind in New Orleans were black: they make up the majority of the population within the city limits and among them are the city's poorest citizens. However, they don't make up the majority of the greater New Orleans area. Black people are not in the majority in any metropolitan area in the US, though they do outnumber white people overall in the state of Mississippi, where there has never been a black governor.
Black people watching in the rest of the country understood right away what was happening. The poor had been left to be washed away, then to fend for themselves. Maybe pockets of rich people will be discovered, guarding their possessions, but most likely there will be stories of the poor defending what they had. Those with money, white and black, got out.
Maybe a number of people paid little heed to the warnings to evacuate, because there had been such warnings in the past and the storms turned out not to be as furious as had been predicted; but maybe large numbers didn't leave because they had no way to get out, no car, no bus ticket, and because they had nowhere to go if they did get out, no money for a motel. It was not a nice experience watching helpless blacks, the elderly, pregnant women, and children, being winched to safety by helmeted white guys.
Fortunately, a black guy, a volunteer, was filmed using an axe to chop through rooftops to help people escape. They were soaked, and the dread they'd just escaped in those attics of ever rising water was suggested by the expressions on their faces. The rest of the US could see their fear, but they couldn't see the country's fear of them.
In the US, white people are able to conceive of black people who are better than they are or worse than they are, superior or inferior, but they seem to have a hard time imagining black people who are just like them. Officials in the affected areas are already beginning to have their say about the inadequacy of the measures the federal and state governments had in place to cope with the catastrophe, but maybe one of the reasons the rest of the country sat around and didn't seem able to take hold right away was their fear of the black people left behind.
When I heard that relief workers had been told not to go on the New Orleans streets I had to ask if they were white. One story quoted a black woman who complained that the truckloads of national guardsmen wouldn't make eye contact with the people in the streets. Maybe they are under orders determined by emergency priorities, but in the south the national guard is overwhelmingly white. These are the new policemen, with shoot-to-kill orders. The images of black people emerging from broken glass fronts with armloads of clothes or cigarettes bring to mind the LA riots, as if to say: this is what black people do at the first breakdown of public order. They, or the criminals and opportunists among them, can turn even a natural disaster into civil disorder. So far only Jesse Jackson has complained about the racist display the US is putting on for an international audience.
Louisiana has a large poor white population, but where have they gone? Where are the white people? New Orleans sits in a basin and hasn't the same pattern of suburbs as other US cities, but it does have them. Ninety percent of the houses in the town of Slidell, just over the bridge across Lake Pontchartrain, have been ruined. The west-lying towns, on higher ground, all have a river side, their backs to the levee. Where are those residents? They got out.
Novelist Richard Ford, who lived in New Orleans for many years, observed that Mayor Nagin had been brave to tell everyone to leave. People in the Superdome are alive, he said, because they were there, not somewhere else, but then the conditions quickly deteriorated. Of the 25,000 people shipped to the Houston Astrodome the vast majority are black. The crowd at the convention centre includes white people, but the feeling among black people seems to be that the media have once again found an occasion to portray black people as lawless and that were an equal number of whites stranded in a destroyed city, federal government help would have been dispatched more quickly.
The army bases that have been closed recently in the south as economy measures should be opened up. It is a scandal that at the time of writing there have been no air drops of any kind. The recovery will be difficult, because of who has insurance and who doesn't, to start with. And then there is all that mud. Maybe Bush can't respond convincingly to the calamity because to do so would require thinking along New Deal lines, in terms of the kind of governmental agencies that he is ideologically opposed to.
After years of not investing in the country's infrastructure, this could be the first consequence of misspending. The US telephone systems, bridges, railroads and highways are in poor shape. The authorities were told 25 years ago that the New Orleans levees could not withstand a storm of Katrina's magnitude, but a city that votes Democratic wasn't going to get the necessary allocations to refortify the works. Bush turned down foreign aid because America is the giver, not the receiver, but they are also not talking much in the US news media about what we can't afford and what resources aren't available because of the war in Iraq.
We are becoming like the countries we criticise and pity, places where the state and the society have less and less to do with each other. We are on our own, but then black people have always known that.
· Darryl Pinckney is the author of a novel, High Cotton
http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1561997,00.html
Saturday September 3, 2005
The Guardian
There were a number of white looters involved in the LA riots, a fact ignored or suppressed a decade ago. And so, as a black viewer, I was relieved yesterday when Channel 4 News finally found a white face among the victims of Hurricane Katrina pushing shopping carts through the water. The woman insisted to the camera that it was the police themselves who had told people to go into stores and get what they needed. She hadn't taken any clothes, she said. She was surviving, not shopping.
The only other white faces I saw during the report were those of national guardsmen, pleading officials and helicopter rescue personnel. I was so busy hoping that the news would get across the commonality created by the emergency that I completely missed the point. There is a reason everyone whom reporters found on the beach front in Biloxi, Mississippi, was white and in some cases low-income: US-style residential segregation.
And there is a reason why the people left behind in New Orleans were black: they make up the majority of the population within the city limits and among them are the city's poorest citizens. However, they don't make up the majority of the greater New Orleans area. Black people are not in the majority in any metropolitan area in the US, though they do outnumber white people overall in the state of Mississippi, where there has never been a black governor.
Black people watching in the rest of the country understood right away what was happening. The poor had been left to be washed away, then to fend for themselves. Maybe pockets of rich people will be discovered, guarding their possessions, but most likely there will be stories of the poor defending what they had. Those with money, white and black, got out.
Maybe a number of people paid little heed to the warnings to evacuate, because there had been such warnings in the past and the storms turned out not to be as furious as had been predicted; but maybe large numbers didn't leave because they had no way to get out, no car, no bus ticket, and because they had nowhere to go if they did get out, no money for a motel. It was not a nice experience watching helpless blacks, the elderly, pregnant women, and children, being winched to safety by helmeted white guys.
Fortunately, a black guy, a volunteer, was filmed using an axe to chop through rooftops to help people escape. They were soaked, and the dread they'd just escaped in those attics of ever rising water was suggested by the expressions on their faces. The rest of the US could see their fear, but they couldn't see the country's fear of them.
In the US, white people are able to conceive of black people who are better than they are or worse than they are, superior or inferior, but they seem to have a hard time imagining black people who are just like them. Officials in the affected areas are already beginning to have their say about the inadequacy of the measures the federal and state governments had in place to cope with the catastrophe, but maybe one of the reasons the rest of the country sat around and didn't seem able to take hold right away was their fear of the black people left behind.
When I heard that relief workers had been told not to go on the New Orleans streets I had to ask if they were white. One story quoted a black woman who complained that the truckloads of national guardsmen wouldn't make eye contact with the people in the streets. Maybe they are under orders determined by emergency priorities, but in the south the national guard is overwhelmingly white. These are the new policemen, with shoot-to-kill orders. The images of black people emerging from broken glass fronts with armloads of clothes or cigarettes bring to mind the LA riots, as if to say: this is what black people do at the first breakdown of public order. They, or the criminals and opportunists among them, can turn even a natural disaster into civil disorder. So far only Jesse Jackson has complained about the racist display the US is putting on for an international audience.
Louisiana has a large poor white population, but where have they gone? Where are the white people? New Orleans sits in a basin and hasn't the same pattern of suburbs as other US cities, but it does have them. Ninety percent of the houses in the town of Slidell, just over the bridge across Lake Pontchartrain, have been ruined. The west-lying towns, on higher ground, all have a river side, their backs to the levee. Where are those residents? They got out.
Novelist Richard Ford, who lived in New Orleans for many years, observed that Mayor Nagin had been brave to tell everyone to leave. People in the Superdome are alive, he said, because they were there, not somewhere else, but then the conditions quickly deteriorated. Of the 25,000 people shipped to the Houston Astrodome the vast majority are black. The crowd at the convention centre includes white people, but the feeling among black people seems to be that the media have once again found an occasion to portray black people as lawless and that were an equal number of whites stranded in a destroyed city, federal government help would have been dispatched more quickly.
The army bases that have been closed recently in the south as economy measures should be opened up. It is a scandal that at the time of writing there have been no air drops of any kind. The recovery will be difficult, because of who has insurance and who doesn't, to start with. And then there is all that mud. Maybe Bush can't respond convincingly to the calamity because to do so would require thinking along New Deal lines, in terms of the kind of governmental agencies that he is ideologically opposed to.
After years of not investing in the country's infrastructure, this could be the first consequence of misspending. The US telephone systems, bridges, railroads and highways are in poor shape. The authorities were told 25 years ago that the New Orleans levees could not withstand a storm of Katrina's magnitude, but a city that votes Democratic wasn't going to get the necessary allocations to refortify the works. Bush turned down foreign aid because America is the giver, not the receiver, but they are also not talking much in the US news media about what we can't afford and what resources aren't available because of the war in Iraq.
We are becoming like the countries we criticise and pity, places where the state and the society have less and less to do with each other. We are on our own, but then black people have always known that.
· Darryl Pinckney is the author of a novel, High Cotton
http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1561997,00.html
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Wetlands were a large part of New Orleans natural buffer against big storms. Key word there, "were."
-------------------------------------
President Bush promises a "net gain" in the nation's wetlands
April 22, 2004: On Earth Day, President Bush touted his administration's new plan to save 3 million acres of wetlands over the next five years. He pledged new spending for voluntary and incentive-based programs to achieve this "net gain" of wetlands by creating 1 million acres, restoring 1 million acres and enhancing 1 million acres. Environmentalists, dismissing the president's announcement as hollow rhetoric, responded by blasting the administration for ordering federal agency field staff to stop protecting as many as 20 million acres of wetlands and an untold number of waterways nationwide. That "guidance," issued in January 2003, effectively lifted Clean Water Act protection for certain streams, ponds and wetlands without any scientific justification, critics charged. As a result of the move, they say, corporate polluters can dump toxic waste, animal waste, oil and chemicals into these wetlands and streams, or dredge or fill them without a permit and without any public input.
"Wetlands restoration is a good thing, but as one of America's leading wetlands experts put it, restoring wetlands is like trying to put the hamburger back on the cow. A better way to stem the tide of wetlands losses would be to stop weakening environmental protections in the first place," said Daniel Rosenberg, an attorney in NRDC's clean water program. "Empty promises won't change the fact that President Bush's policies have turned his father's goal of 'no net loss' of wetlands into ' pro net loss'."
http://www.nrdc.org/media/pressreleases/040422a.asp
CBS Radio News reports that New Orleans City Councilman Oliver Thomas said people are too afraid of black people to go in and save them. He added that rumors of shootings and riots are making people afraid to take in people who are being portrayed as thugs and thieves.
"If we were lucky, we would have died," Thomas was told by a woman still waiting to find shelter, reports CBS Radio News.
Black members of Congress expressed anger Friday at what they said was a slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina.
"It looks dysfunctional to me right now," said Rep. Diane Watson, D-Calif.
She and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, along with members of the Black Leadership Forum, National Urban League and the NAACP, held a news conference and charged that the response was slow because those most affected are poor.
Many also are black, but the lawmakers held off on charging racism.
"The issue is not about race right now," said Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio. "There will be another time to have issues about color."
Watson and others also took issue with the word "refugee" being used to describe hurricane victims.
"'Refugee' calls up to mind people that come from different lands and have to be taken care of. These are American citizens," Watson said.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the most prominent black person in the Bush administration, downplayed the criticism.
"That Americans would somehow in a color-affected way decide who to help and who not to help, I, I just don't believe it," she said. "The African-American community has obviously been very heavily affected. But people are doing what they can for Americans. Nobody wants to see any American suffer."
In conversations at restaurants, homes, offices, on talk radio and online, it's clear that many blacks and whites view the effects of Katrina differently.
Although no group is monolithic in opinion or emotion, many blacks are outraged that so many of their own were left behind in New Orleans with no evacuation plan and no urgent effort to rescue them.
"Black people are mad because they feel the reason for the slow response is because those people are black and they didn't support George Bush," said Ron Walters, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland. "And I don't expect that feeling to go away anytime soon."
No one questions that whites have been moved by the suffering of blacks, and vice versa. But amid images of black looters, some sympathy threatens to give way to anger and disdain.
The hurricane's racial conflict took on political overtones Friday, as black leaders blasted the Bush administration's slow response and asked whether race played a part.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson charged that race was "at least a factor" in the slow response.
"We have an amazing tolerance for black pain," he told CNN on Friday. He questioned why the U.S. military couldn't house many of the homeless on unused military airbases, adding that more people will die of starvation and dehydration than from drowning.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, D- Md., stopped short of that, saying that it was the frail, the weak and the sick who were left in need. But in an interview on CNN, Cummings said, "I'm not sure" if racism was partly responsible for the problems.
"All I know is that a number of the faces that I saw were African-American," he said.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/03/katrina/main814623.shtml
Sunday September 4, 2005
The Observer
Civil rights leaders, church officials and rap stars have united in ferocious criticism of President George Bush's attitude towards the tens of thousands of black people still trying to escape the hell of New Orleans.
An overwhelming majority of the refugees are African-Americans, who make up 67 per cent of the city's half-million population, and some are questioning whether the government's response would have been quicker had the catastrophe struck a white community. The Reverend Calvin Butts, president of New York City's Council of Churches, writes in today's Observer: 'If this hurricane had struck a white middle-class neighbourhood in the north-east or the south-west, his response would have been a lot stronger.'
In an extraordinary outburst during a live television fundraising concert broadcast on America's NBC network, the rapper Kanye West said: 'Bush doesn't care about black people. It's been five days [waiting for help] because most of the people are black. America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible. We already realised a lot of the people that could help are at war right now.'
The episode was further proof of growing anger within the black community and a belief that race was a factor in the days of delay before troops and emergency supplies began to arrive.
Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader, said he saw 'a historical indifference to the pain of poor people and black people' in the US and said it was poignant that blacks were suffering in New Orleans, for many years the south's biggest slave-trade port.
'Today I saw 5,000 African-Americans on Highway 10, desperate, perishing, dehydrating, babies crying - it looked like the hold of a slave ship. It's so ugly and obvious. The issue of race as a factor will not go away.'
It was always likely that a controversy would emerge over the racial make-up of the survivors. Almost a third of blacks in New Orleans live below the poverty line and many simply did not have the means to heed mayor Ray Nagin's mandatory evacuation order before the storm hit, while most in the more affluent white community were able to escape.
Nagin, who is black, was criticised for not mobilising buses for those who lacked transport, but Jackson said the blame lay elsewhere. 'The mayor of New Orleans did not cut the budget on building a stronger levee to protect the city from a flood in the event of a storm,' he said.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1562518,00.html
The president’s supporters rightly dismiss this as nonsense. What is true, however, is that the flood has exposed the dark underbelly of America’s economic success story. The most successful economy in the world, one that we admire for its enterprise and dynamism, has spawned a society where the divisions between rich and poor, and between black and white, are enormous. Social mobility has stalled and the ghetto is alive and flourishing in 21st-century America.
Nowhere was this more true than New Orleans, mainly black and with nearly a third of its population living below the poverty line. This is the reality of America’s underclass and of the capacity for violence and criminality that lies just below the surface. Certainly they perceive themselves as abandoned to their social and economic fate. The national unemployment rate for black Americans of nearly 10% is more than double that for whites. More than a third of black teenagers are out of work, three times the rate for whites. Blacks believe they get fewer jobs and longer prison sentences simply because of their colour.
All is not gloom, though. America has made progress over the past two decades on social issues, including cutting the number of babies born to teenage single mothers and reducing the crime rate. Welfare reform, involving both stick and carrot, has been used intelligently. The majority of the population, black, white and Hispanic, has benefited in part from the nation’s economic success. But as Charles Murray, the American sociologist, has pointed out in these pages, there remains a large underclass in America, predominantly black. It has its counterpart in Britain. It should not take a natural disaster to remind us that this is both a stain on and a danger to society.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1763821,00.html