Residents Leaving New Orleans

We act as if this has never happened before.

It took the media days to finally state an obvious fact. The vast, overwhelming majority of Hurricane Katrina's victims were Black. When they did finally say it, they also noted that those abandoned and left to fend for themselves were poor. For the first time in a long time, race and poverty managed to break through this country's unofficial news blackout to be addressed on the TVs, on the radios, and in the newspapers. And all it took was to have massive and uncounted numbers of human beings go for days and days and days without food and water. All it took were enough pictures of babies, children, and pregnant women waiting in a football stadium and lined up inside and outside of a convention center in high water and baking heat. All it took was enough people standing outside that stadium, outside that convention center, on rooftops, and balconies yelling ‘Help!’ over and over again into cameras that never bothered to bring them into such sharp focus before.

All it took was having enough hard working and poorly compensated Black men and women wandering around searching desperately for families whom they had struggled so hard and long to hold together.

All it took was having men and women in their sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties go for days without medication.
All it took was enough bodies of babies, men, women, and seniors to fill enough airspace and column inches to finally have someone say the words that have gone so long unspoken: Black and poor.

The first to speak out were Black political leaders. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus were given more airtime than they have had in years to denounce the undeniable fact that race and income determined who got left behind and the painfully slow response by local, state, and, most especially and significantly, the federal government. Jesse Jackson could be found on CNN, with thinly veiled rage, saying that many Black people felt that race and poverty were factors in the lack of response.

Yet there was a certain defensiveness that could be heard when they spoke out. "I'm not saying that myself," Jackson said, qualifying his statement. It's easy to understand why. During the Black Freedom Struggle there was an almost immediate backlash against the movement, a reaction so strong that it lead to unparalleled electoral success for the Republican party, steady retreat by the Democrats, and a general silence about race that has been maintained ever since. Anyone, especially someone Black, attempting to discuss race was met with arrogant dismal. Suggest that anti-Black racism was an essential factor in the history of this country, that it influenced public policy and politics, that it still existed, and one was routinely met with the accusation that you were ‘Playing the race card.’

This response reared its head quickly and early. Many were shocked, Shocked! at the suggestion that race played any part in the abysmal response by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), an agency controlled and run by the Bush administration. Condoleeza Rice played tennis, attended a Broadway show, and bought thousands of dollars of shoes at an exclusive store, while thousands of Black people suffered and died. Days later, she managed to put in an appearance, not in Louisiana, not in Mississippi, but in Alabama, surrounded by White members of the media, declaring that, as an African-American women, she was sure that race played no role in the Bush administration's pathetic response, an administration of which she is a member.

She was particularly agitated by the suggestion that George W. Bush was indifferent to the fate of Black people. To hear her speak, you would believe that Bush was Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela combined instead of a White, right-wing Republican whose electoral success has been largely at the expense of human beings like those left behind in New Orleans.

The backlash continued as television and newspapers showed images of Black people looking for food, water, clothing, and medicine. They were called looters instead of survivors. They were implicitly blamed for staying behind, for refusing to leave, for being too stupid to understand what whites and middle-class Blacks got so easily.

Little survivors

Demonizing Black people in order to rationalize their suffering is an old dodge. And slow responses to Black suffering have been the rule, not the exception in this country.

Casey Edward Greene, writing about the 1900 Galveston, Texas Hurricane notes that after the storm "Galveston's black citizens--many of whom had performed heroic rescues--were vilified in the local press as scavengers and looters, or portrayed as lazy and childlike.

Discriminatory practices in the distribution of relief supplies and donations also worked against African Americans, who received only what was left over--if that."

Erik Larson writes in Isaac's Storm, that "Black men were said to have begun looting bodies, chewing off fingers to gain access to diamond rings, then stuffing the fingers in their pockets. The nation's press took these stories as truth, then pumped them full of even more lurid details." He notes that on Thursday, Sept. 13, 1900 the Alabama Daily Register told its readers that "fifty Negroes had been shot to death in Galveston. 'The ghouls,' the newspaper reported, 'were holding an orgie [sic] over the dead.'"

And during the flood, as Larson shows, the line between those who had power and those who did not was thrown into even sharper relief: "On Monday, the burial committee resolved to begin burying bodies at sea. All day long, fire wagons, hearses, and cargo drays hauled stacks of bodies to the city's wharf, where crews loaded them onto an open barge. The city's racial harmony began to erode. Soldiers rounded up fifty black men at gunpoint and forced them onto the barge, promising whiskey to help make the task of loading, weighting, and dumping the bodies more tolerable."

Woman stranded on her porch

Given that news media, in all their forms, are predominantly, overwhelming white, the coverage presenting Black victims as somehow deserving of their suffering is no surprise. What may be a surprise to many--the Black many included--is that we have left our own record of our experiences and they tell a different story entirely. There are oral histories, WPA accounts, and family stories detailing what has happened to us during this flood. And if we examine this record we understand that what we are seeing in Katrina's aftermath has been seen before. The problem is that we have stopped listening.

The 1927 Mississippi River Flood swamped over 16 million acres of land across seven states from Illinois to Mississippi. It displaced 637,546 people. Many found themselves in Red Cross camps, or in private homes that the Red Cross arranged. Between 250 and 500 people lost their lives, and a significant number of them were Black. As always, being Black was the determinant factor in their treatment.

If you want to understand the Black experience with catastrophic events like this, look no further than the blues, which were born in the Mississippi Delta. Many blues artists wrote songs about the 1927 flood: Charley Patton ("High Water Everywhere"); Bessie Smith ("Backwater Blues"; and Lonnie Johnson ("Broken Levee Blues") are just three. Read their lyrics; better yet, listen to them, and you will see that we have been to this show before.
For example, when Lonnie Johnson sang "Work, fight or go to jail, but I ain't tatin' no sacks. I ain't gonna drown in that river, and you ain't gonna break my back" in "Broken Levee Blues," he was leaving a record of an experience that has been covered up and ignored. Blues scholar Scott Ainslie analyzes the meaning of the lines in light of an incident in Greenville, Miss. "White sheriff's deputies, deputized white landowners, and poor whites in charge of repairing a major break in the levee, ran out of sandbags." They brought in Black men, at gunpoint, and gave them the choice. They could lie down to stabilize the levee with their bodies until more sandbags came. They could refuse, be shot and get buried on the levee with the sandbags when they arrived. Picture hundreds of Black bodies lying next to or on top of one another with the waters of the Mississippi River "washing over their heads while they waited for more sand to be delivered and more sandbags to be filled." The blues contain more than simple commentary. They provide a historical thread that we can follow into the fabric of American public policy.

Black men filling sand bags

The natural question to ask is why would those with power enact such policies whose deadly consequences are so easily foreseen? Simply put, because it allows them to maintain power. Using race as a wedge in politics is an effective strategy and it works every time.

New Orleans is the 21st century equivalent of forcing Black people to lie down. The Whites who used Black bodies as sandbags to ensure their survival were simply following a long established policy of treating human beings as disposable. The Bush administration’s overall indifference to New Orleans and the disregard that Black victims were and continue to be shown are the result of intentional policies that deny services, especially when Black people are thought to benefit. We can see this at work in the public schools, in health care, medical services, policing, and the collapse of the urban infrastructure. Viewed in this light, New Orleans was no accident. It was the way things are supposed to work in a country run by people who see no role for government in the lives of its citizens. This view of government abandons the idea of a common good, and simply leaves people on their own.

Katrina merely pressed the fast forward button on America's atrocious racial policies. What happened to the people trapped in New Orleans happens, in real time, to the Black working class and poor everyday. They suffer and die too, just more slowly.