SS Deep Dixie
I earlier referred to Amardeep’s post on issues of race in the coverage of Katrina:
First, have you noticed that numerous articles refer to the affected region as “third world” in its devastation?
… The second issue circles around race within the U.S. If you watch the news footage of the post-Katrina rescue operations, you’ll notice again and again that the people being rescued seem to be overwhelmingly African American.
The question of race was recently picked up by Joan Walsh in Salon:
As I watched buses make their way from the Superdome to the Astrodome in Houston, in a surreal and perverse echo of the Freedom Rides of the ’60s, a few thoughts were inescapable. Why didn’t we send a caravan of buses into the city’s poorest neighborhoods on Saturday or Sunday, when the dimensions of the disaster were already predictable? And what is really going to happen in Houston? These are dispossessed people who’ve been further dispossessed — do we have a word for that? After a few days, the Superdome is already a slice of hell, with overflowing bathrooms, fights, rape allegations and now, people dying outside. Do we expect the Astrodome — abandoned by the Houston Astros in 2000 for Enron Field, excuse me, Minute Maid Park — to fare much better? Sure, Houston’s got electricity and running water, but tens of thousands of scared, angry people packed into an abandoned sports stadium — we couldn’t come up with a better symbol of how little we care about the poor, how little we’ve thought about what to do with them, for them, if we tried.
As if to make sure we didn’t miss the ironies, the same week as Katrina came news that the poverty rate has climbed again, the fourth straight year under President Bush. But let’s be fair: John Kerry barely mentioned the poor last year. And while President Clinton’s booming 1990s lifted some boats, and his welfare reform at least muted the ideological sniping about whether poor folks were victims or freeloaders, nobody’s bothered lately to pay much attention to whether welfare reform made people’s lives better, whether it paved a path out of poverty or just moved its subjects into the vast ranks of the working poor.
As well as Leon Wynter on NPR. (From whose piece the title of this post was taken.) The “uncut” version is on his blog. Here is the part that was cut:
Another TV ‘relief official’ said Auntie was just plain unplanned. Unplanned —like what happens–who happens–when you’re too dumb or lazy to use birth control. If you’re poor, that is. As if there was still anybody planning for the black and the poor in America.
Amy Sullivan also links to this Washington Post piece about “one family’s ordeal leaving New Orleans.” She comments:
The father describes standing in his living room with his wife and five children as the floodwaters rose, trying to decide what to do. They have a car, but he says “it’s a five-seater” and some of the family members would have had to sit on laps. Seems like a ridiculous reason to stay, no? But then he explains that they heard the highway police would not hesitate to arrest drivers who broke the law. So he stayed at home, choosing to take his chances with nature instead of taking his chances as a black man in the Southern criminal justice system.
What is really strange is that these issues were not being discussed on TV. As Jack Shafer discussed on Slate:
If the reporter on the ground couldn’t answer the questions, a researcher could have Nexised the New Orleans Times-Picayune five-parter from 2002, “Washing Away,” which reported that the city’s 100,000 residents without private transportation were likely to be stranded by a big storm. In other words, what’s happening is what was expected to happen: The poor didn’t get out in time.
I’ll add more related articles to this post as I find them. Feel free to post more to the comments.
UPDATE: Three more posts on Katrina and race via BoingBoing:
On an NBC telethon, singer Kayne West said: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people!” NBC disavowed his statements, and there are reports that Comcast is censoring the CNN coverage of the episode.
Jordan Flaherty, an editor of Left Turn magazine writes:
The city has a 40% illiteracy rate, and over 50% of black ninth graders will not graduate in four years. Louisiana spends on average $4,724 per child’s education and ranks 48th in the country for lowest teacher salaries. The equivalent of more than two classrooms of young people drop out of Louisiana schools every day and about 50,000 students are absent from school on any given day. Far too many young black men from New Orleans end up enslaved in Angola Prison, a former slave plantation where inmates still do manual farm labor, and over 90% of inmates eventually die in the prison. It is a city where industry has left, and most remaining jobs are are low-paying, transient, insecure jobs in the service economy.
Race has always been the undercurrent of Louisiana politics. This disaster is one that was constructed out of racism, neglect and incompetence. Hurricane Katrina was the inevitable spark igniting the gasoline of cruelty and corruption. From the neighborhoods left most at risk, to the treatment of the refugees to the the media portrayal of the victims, this disaster is shaped by race.
Malik Rahim, a veteran of the Black Panther Party in New Orleans, for decades an organizer of public housing tenants both there and in San Francisco and a recent Green Party candidate for New Orleans City Council writes (via this BoingBoing post):
It’s not like New Orleans was caught off guard. This could have been prevented.
There’s military right here in New Orleans, but for three days they weren’t even mobilized. You’d think this was a Third World country.
UPDATE: Were things really that out-of-control on the ground?
UPDATE: “Stuff like this makes me fear for the future of the human race.” So says Kevin Drum about a news story that
the Louisiana State Crescent City Connection Police Department closed to foot traffic the three access points to the bridge closest to the West Bank of the river.
When confronted by the blockade:
Members of the group nonetheless approached the police lines, and “questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge … They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City.
“These were code words,” the paramedics wrote, “for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.”
UPDATE: Naomi Klein writes:
New Orleans could be reconstructed by and for the very people most victimised by the flood.
UPDATE: What the right is saying.
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Comments
I never watch “live news” anymore, so I can’t really comment on the US media coverage myself - but it is strange that the European media wouldn’t comment on it!
I ve followed the media coverage extensively. They are criticizing US-american government for it`s environment politics on the one hand and the lack of organized help on the other. But nobody discusses explicitly the fact that it is about 95% nonwhites that could not leave the area. Plus, many I`ve talked to here were not aware that most of those people could not afford to leave and were forced to stay.
In the media it appeared as taken-for-granted that its mostly afro-americans that have stayed in the area.
Let me add a comment on N24 that just passed me by a few minutes ago:
“The people that are suffering most are the poor, the old and the afro-americans.”
There are a lot of national discussions that need to be had in the wake of Katrina, but this issue (race) is one that is going to have to be a carefully parsed. Given the demographics (67% black, 30% below the poverty line) of New Orleans, it is inevitable that issues of race and class are intertwined, and it is easy for the class issues and poverty issues to be lost when the question of race comes up. Racism is a problem here, but the bigger issue is poverty — the loss of a social safety net in the U.S., the widening economic gap between the haves and have nots, etc. — and the solutions to racism are different from the poverty/class issues.
Again, I don’t want to make light of concerns about race prejudice in the evacuation of New Orleans, but I really believe poverty and not racism is the bigger issue.
Now if you talk about institutational racism in the media coverage, that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms.
TC, Sorry to see the pictures of your folks house! You are, of course, correct to point out the importance of poverty, and how intertwined these issues are; however, I am not so sure that the state would have been so negligent in attending to the needs of the poor had they been white. More importantly, judging by the reaction, many of the country’s black population see race as the crucial factor.
I have argued before that on a whole host of issues, such as education, wealth (not income) is more important than race in determining social status. However, one must not discount the importance of institutionalized racism. For instance, studies have shown that blacks tend not to receive the same levels of medical care for the same illnesses and end up being sick longer. So I find it unlikely that the media is the only source of institutional racism here.
Thanks, Kerim. You’re right racism is a problem here, but I’m still worried that the race debate (something that is needed) will overshadow the poverty debate. And I think that if the poverty issues are truely addressed it will not only lead to a greater degree of positive change in this society, but it will also put us in a better place from which to have that long hard look at racism.
Excuse me Sirs, I hardly understand the distinction of poverty and race issues with the poor people over there mostly being nonwhites. Probably I`m simplifying too much. Is it possible to talk about race and society without a synoptic view on living conditions?
Orange,
This is a common misperception. While nonwhites are disproportionately poor in comparison with their numbers, and are more concentrated in urban areas, the fact is that the majority of American’s poor are, in fact, white. Moreover, white non-hispanics are the growing as a percentage of the poor.
The Census numbers are here [PDF].
BBC report.
This is a common misperception.
I don`t think it is a misperception at all concerning this entry`s topic and those people who stayed at the superdome in New Orleans, for these could not leave town but obviously had no reason to stay at their homes.
Anyway, thank you for the link.
Nevermind. It was my lack of precision.
Poverty is a central issue especially to the ones having followed live news and media coverage on tv,
because the information that came out until fifth day after the storm was limited to the representation of the superdromepeople and actually you were shown almost only blacks in there.
When at the sixth and seventh day reports from New Orleans French Quarter appeared on tv, the frequency of coloured people being pictured and giving interviews changed towards zero.
Property is a central issue within the media coverage of Katrina desaster (and this is what I`m talking about, being aware its a representation of things and not things themselves). There were different stages. Until fourth day after the storm over here you were shown exclusively reports from the superdome: suffering, loothing, anarchy and violence. (I second almost all people shown here were afro americans) Lousiana`s governor`s decision to allow shooting at loothers was discussed largely.
Fifth day of report there more and more whites appeared, but such who had not left their houses in fear of loothers and in order to protect their property with their guns.
Then, sixth day, the reporters “discovered” French Quarter. Only whites on the screen here. So you get the impression there don`t live many blacks in that French Quarter, New Orleans. Of course you ask yourself for the reasons and if this is a misrepresentation made by media.
If it is not, in large context theres the property aka poverty issue again.
Let me add,
I think we are looking at the same thing. Poverty aka property and racialization issues are tied through history up to the presence. But, I agree that stressing the race issue as a starting point for public discussion is counterproductive in regards of spotlighting present implications, because the reflection resulting from that point is very much prescribed, as we ve seen in the African Village Case. You won`t succeed in making people (outside your academic peer group) more sensible to the subtile structures and mechanism of racialization processes and their daily representations by focussing ´racism`, because everyone immediately starts to defend themselves as not being ´racist`.
No further reflection possible then–except among people who anyway already had been aware of ´racialization processes`, you know?
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
What is really strange is that these issues were not being discussed on TV.
Absolutely strange, for the obvious coherence of poverty and skincolour are striking within the pictures and information I`ve received via tv over here. And those are not discussed explicitly here non plus.