It's not just Bush; It's America

UNDERPRIVILEGED


By Dara Purvis RAW STORY COLUMNIST

It was a horrifically literal example of white flight.

As Hurricane Katrina approached New Orleans, its citizens were ordered to evacuate—but no mass transportation out of the city using buses, trains, or other forms of mass transit were provided. People were told to get in their cars and drive away.

The problem, as has become atrociously apparent over the last week, is that huge numbers of New Orleans’s poor don’t have cars, and couldn’t get out. Let me specify further—huge numbers of black people in New Orleans didn’t have cars, and were therefore left seeking refuge on roofs. As reported by the New York Times, of the 28 percent of New Orleans residents living below the poverty line, 84 percent of those are black. Nearly 22,000 black households live below the poverty line and don’t have a car, almost ten times the number of corresponding white households.

So when the first harrowing images of families driven to rooftops above roiling waters began to air on television, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that almost all the faces of desperate refugees were black.

A frustration of the aftermath, furthermore, has been the absolute unwillingness of so many people to talk about the serious issues of race and class that the incompetent responses to the disaster of Katrina has brought so vividly to the forefront of the news. Even as poor black families were more likely to be stranded in the flood, even as black homes were more likely to be destroyed, as the poor areas of New Orleans were generally also the lowest elevation points in the city, and even as the desperation of the tragedy became more and more clear, lawmakers seemed determined to continue their gladhanding and self-congratulation as the pathetically inadequate relief and rescue efforts began.

Finally the poor, black residents of New Orleans did begin to get some mentions in the news—but not in the way you would think. Michael Brown, the ridiculously incompetent head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), blamed the residents of New Orleans stranded by their inability to hop in a Porsche and flee, saying that the number of people killed in New Orleans is “attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings.” I suppose his own inability to heed the reality of modern America, where every family does not have a full two-car garage, is irrelevant.

And then there was the famous captioning debacle. Two photos posted on Yahoo News showed much the same scene: in one, a man and woman wade through chest-deep water holding a loaf of bread and wearing backpacks, in the other, a young man wades through water towing a bag behind him and carrying what could practically be the same loaf of bread. In the first picture, captioned by the Agence France Presse/Getty, the reader is told that the couple is “finding” food. In the second, captioned by the Associated Press, the young man in contrast is apparently “looting.” The other difference, as you probably already know, is that the couple is white, and the single man is black. In a less-distributed third image, the Associated Press describes a white person looking in a plastic shopping bag as they walk away from what looks like a 7-11 with a broken window as simply “looking through their shopping bag,” as if they had just purchased their items from a particularly devoted cashier.

As frustration mounted, more and more examples of enraged public figures losing their cool began to appear. In one case it was CNN anchor Anderson Cooper interrupting Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu’s Pollyanna-esque recitation of politicians whose largesse she wanted to thank, to describe to Landrieu the dead constituents Cooper saw lying in the street being eaten by rats. In one of the most heartbreaking examples, on Meet the Press a church leader from Louisiana choked out the story in between tears of an elderly woman who kept calling for someone to come rescue her day after day, eventually drowning several days after her first phone call, before anyone ever went to save her.

The most controversial, however, was probably Kanye West’s outburst at the telethon to raise money for the victims of Katrina. Departing entirely from the canned script prepared for him, West spoke extemporaneously and emotionally about the news of the last week. His voice trembling with what was clearly barely-contained rage and grief, he engaged in a stream-of-consciousness rant about how easy it is to turn away from the victims, and how not enough aid and money was being sent, then referred to the famous looting versus finding photos. As Mike Myers recited his written lines, West took a few deep breaths, and at his next cue emphatically stated what was perhaps the source of some of his rage, saying “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” The broadcast then hurriedly cut away.

Conservative commentators have already predictably declared that West’s outburst was a disgrace. This is ignoring the fact that West’s speech was probably the most heartfelt during the whole telethon—in sharp contrast with the carefully respectful moues of concern that most celebrities affected while reading cue cards in a hushed monotone, West is viscerally painful to watch—he’s clearly hanging on to his composure by bare threads, taking gulps of air in between trying to convey his anger and frustration.

Can we honestly disagree with him? Bush doesn’t have any track record of working with or respect for black Americans—I will never forget his defense of failing to attend an NAACP conference by saying that he didn’t need to because he had Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice in his cabinet, the most egregious example of “I can’t be racist; I have a black friend” in recent memory—but it is pathetic that most Americans can look at the television images of poor and largely black refugees from a national disaster within our own borders and not even remark on the clearly disproportionate harm being suffered by African-Americans.

Perhaps that is the problem with what Kanye West said—it’s not that George Bush doesn’t care about black people, it’s that America doesn’t care about black people—at least the poor ones, anyway.

There are people working very hard to help those affected by Katrina, but too many are either ignoring one of the biggest disasters in American history or condemning the victims for not owning the means to escape. The hurricane has affected everyone in New Orleans, and is a tragedy from which no resident of the entire area will recover for quite some time. But it is absolute barbarity to not acknowledge that the poor have been affected much more negatively, and the disproportionate number of poor blacks have been hit the worst. Katrina was a natural disaster, but it has exposed issues of race and class that we desperately need to deal with. When it takes Kanye West losing his composure in prime-time to remind us of that, it should be obvious that politicians of both parties aren’t doing their job.

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