Thursday, September 22, 2005

In Memoriam: Dr. Amichai Kronfeld, 1947-2005


Special JPN Tribute by L.S. and S.A.M.

It is with great sadness that the editors of Jewish Peace News announce the passing of Dr. Amichai Kronfeld, 1947-2005, on September 1st, of cancer. Ami, who had been a contributor to JPN since its inception in 2000 and became a regular editor in early 2002, was both a friend to many of us in Jewish Voice for Peace and a long-time, tremendously knowledgeable, and deeply committed activist on behalf of a just and peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ami was a teacher and model to all of us; with his clear thinking and sharp eye he never once strayed from the goal of our work: to use information and communication to build a thriving peace movement, and together to work to overturn the injustice and cruelty of occupation in Israel/Palestine. Among Ami’s great gifts was his ability to see straight through contradictions and hypocrisy and keep the focus on the urgency of the suffering and injustice at hand, while constantly challenging those around him—JPN readers included—to question any assumptions or beliefs that justify the occupation.

In tribute to Ami, we are presenting a collection of brief texts, including a reflection by Rela Mazali; personal reminiscences related by Zehavit Friedman, Diane Wolf, Noam Biale, and Sarah Levin; eulogies by Rachel Biale and Bluma Goldstein; excerpts from accounts of his final months by Chana Bloch; and a sampling of his own writings on Middle East peace and justice issues.

As you will see in the accompanying tributes and commentaries, Ami surrounded himself with loving family and friends, poetry and music, and the pursuit of peace and justice throughout his life. Ami began to develop his critique of Israeli government and society and his political disobedience as a young man fighting in Israel’s wars of 1967, the war of attrition and 1973. Serving in the Sinai desert in 1967, Ami received an order handed down by his commander in the Sinai, Ariel Sharon, to execute captured Egyptian soldiers. Ami refused the order. He fought in the 1973 war despite deep misgivings about the war's causes: he was aware that Israel had rejected an Egyptian peace offer in 1971. He was equally troubled at being sent to fight against the PLO, a group he viewed, against the Israeli party-line of that time, as the legitimate representative of a displaced and oppressed people. It was not until the birth of a political dissent movement among Israelis in the 1970s, and in particular the founding of the Israeli anti-war /anti-occupation organization, Yesh Gvul (“there is a limit”) in the 1980s, that Ami felt fully empowered as a peace and justice advocate.

Ami met and married Chana, his beloved wife of 30 years, in Tel Aviv, and in the mid-1970s immigrated with her to Berkeley, California, where she became a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at UC Berkeley and he became a philosophy and computer science PhD. A researcher in Artificial Intelligence, he eventually returned to teaching college courses not only in philosophy and cognitive science but also on human rights and critical thinking. His goal as a teacher was to provide young people with tools for what he called “intellectual self-defense” against the state propaganda machine. Chana Kronfeld was Ami’s great collaborator in many of his endeavors and one of his great teachers, as he was hers. Their beloved daughter, Maya, was born in 1985. Ami, an avid musician (in Israel he’d performed with well-known artists such as Shimon Israeli and Chanan Yovel), had a special proclivity for jazz, and shared his love of music and ideas with his daughter. For a number of years they played together in a jazz quartet, the Lincoln Street Jazz Brigade, with Maya on piano or keyboard and Ami on drums. Maya has followed in her parents’ intellectual footsteps as well, recently declaring a double-major in philosophy (like her father) and comparative literature (like her mother) at UC-Berkeley, where she is an undergraduate.

In Berkeley, Ami was an important presence in the Mideast peace community. His life experiences gave him insight into the growing Israeli settlement project and the worsening conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Ami worked to promote and support organizations such as New Profile, an Israeli organization that challenged the militancy and patriarchal structures of that society, and Courage to Refuse, a movement of Israeli officers and soldiers who refused to serve in the Occupied Territories. He also became involved in the grass-roots peace and justice organization, Jewish Voice for Peace, and its sponsored news project, Jewish Peace News. During these years, Ami helped to educate American Jewish activists who sought a just and peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Among Ami’s particular contributions to Jewish Peace News was a series that he called the “Peace Index,” modeled on the provocative Harper's Index. Ami gathered and presented the bare and brutal statistics about victims of the violence during the Second Intifada in the Peace Index. He did this, he said, because he felt that, in addition to analytical commentary, it was important for readers of JPN to remain aware of the most basic information about the lives and deaths of those suffering under the Israeli occupation. Ami also contributed his own writing to JPN: an example is his commentary on the Courage to Refuse movement, appended below. Ami’s contributions were extremely well researched, and his voice was one of long experience, wisdom, and nuance.

During the final stages of Ami’s life, his friends gathered around Chana, Maya, and him to support this extraordinary family in their time of need. Chana Bloch, a longtime friend and co-translator with Chana Kronfeld of Hebrew poetry (together they published Open Closed Open, Yehuda Amichai’s last book of poetry, in English, and they will soon publish The Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch as well) wrote regular email reports about Ami’s condition. These reports, circulated among a large group of his friends, were not simply laments; they also sparkled with the richness of Ami’s interior life and his loving embrace of the world even as he was dying. The following are brief excerpts from some of the messages Chana Bloch sent to Ami’s circle in July and August:

7/12/05. [Ami] is walking with a cane because of numbness on his right side. He met with a physical therapist and acquired some coping skills that will help him be more steady on his feet. His mind is still sharp, as I can testify: two weeks ago he worked with Chana and me on some of our translations, drumming out for us subtle variations in rhythm and discovering a crucial literary allusion that both of us missed.

7/26/05. And here is a story to marvel at (I hope I’m telling this right): Two days ago Ami and Maya talked about the music they both love, and Ami beat out the rhythm of one of their jazz songs. “See?” he said. “I can trick the tumor.”

8/22/05. Yesterday brought the terrible news about the suicide of Dahlia Ravikovitch, the poet Ami has been helping us translate. We had asked her if we could dedicate The Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch to Ami's memory because his help has been so instrumental; in her last message to us Dahlia readily agreed, and Ami took pleasure in the thought. That was just a month ago, though it seems much longer.

8/25/05. Ami is having a lot of trouble sleeping, despite the morphine; the doctor called it “terminal phase restlessness.” Each day he is more paralyzed, more helpless. Technically he's “not in pain.” Just in agony. And yet: he managed to sit in the wheelchair to admire the garden, especially a six-foot high sunflower that has been growing wildly. “The garden is performing for him,” said Chana. The gardener planted some trees and shrubs that Ami had chosen, including an apricot tree, which reminded him of Israel.

As Ami lay dying, the politics of the Middle East and the urgent need for justice were still much on his mind. After Ami died, his aunt, Tikva Honig-Parnass, who came from Israel to help care for Ami in the last six weeks of his life, told Chana Bloch that “despite his great difficulty in speaking, he continued to be passionately engaged in political issues, talking about 1948, 1967, the disengagement, the Occupation, the situation of the Palestinians. He had an unswerving commitment to justice.” Chana Bloch continued: “Politics was as much at the core of his being as music and poetry.”

The many friends of the Kronfelds arranged to deliver meals for the family during the final weeks of Ami’s life, and they contributed to a fund to help pay for Ami’s home-care in the terminal phase of his illness. They visited Ami in the hospital and at home, whenever he was up to receiving visitors. Despite the deep sorrow it evoked and continues to evoke for so many of us, Ami's dying became the occasion for an extraordinary outpouring of love and support from the tightly knit community of his friends and family.

Ami Kronfeld will be missed by all of us in Jewish Voice for Peace and Jewish Peace News, and his loss is felt intensely by his loving and beloved friends and family. His family requests that donations in his memory be sent to Jewish Voice for Peace.

Amichai, your memory serves as a blessing upon us all, and your example gives us hope for the day when the world’s swords shall finally be beaten into ploughshares.


—S.A.M. and L.S., for Jewish Peace News

Monday, September 12, 2005

The Racial Perceptions Divide

Elisabeth Bumiller's article in the Times today (see comment #1 below for full text) effectively conveys the White House's fears that the bungled federal response to Hurricane Katrina will affect the Republican party's standing among African American voters. Bumiller cites the unsurprising yet nevertheless telling statistic that two-thirds of blacks polled viewed the race of the victims as an important factor in the lethargic federal response to the disaster, while 77% of whites felt otherwise. The very fact of these nearly reversed ratios—whatever the reality that lies behind them—suggests the extent to which the "color-line" of which Du Bois wrote continues to divide, or at least fracture, the nation. Most astonishing about this article is the comment Bumiller elicits from an anonymous African American supporter of the Bush administration, who counseled the President to "[g]rab some black people who look like they might be preachers" for a photo-op, to compensate for Bush's failure to meet with any blacks in New Orleans during his first tour of the stricken region. The President and his officials, needless to say, did just that.

Sunday, September 11, 2005

Lost Like Us

(At the request of my close friends Jeff and Susette, I wrote the following brief message to their as yet unborn daughter to be read during labor and delivery.)

Dear new one yet to appear in our world,

A phrase my grandfather, Lenny, and his daughter, my mama, used to repeat often: "If you ain't never been lost, you ain't never been far." Well, I suppose that being born is kinda like getting lost in the biggest and baddest way possible. I mean, that womb you've been in for these last nine months must be so very comforting, in its warm quiet undulating dark wetness. And who would want to leave that, right? Well, little one who has yet to appear, I can't say I blame you for feeling that way. I know I did. Let me just reassure you, though, with all the assurance that I can muster from thousands of miles and an unknown number of hours away, that there are some redeeming aspects to life on this side of the great divide. Getting to know what I mean means, probably, getting really confused and lost and all tangled up in the complications of the lives of the many people you'll meet hereabouts. It's worth it. I promise you. And if you later decide I'm wrong, the worst you can say is that I was a fool and you were simple enough to believe me. But I know something that you have yet to discover: that a lot of the people I've met since I broke out (or was expelled, I'm not sure which) have really come to have a terrific importance to me in my life. They've been lost with me, sure, but there was something about being lost with other people I've loved in my life, like your mama Susette and your daddy Jeff, and my own mama and daddy, too, that made the experience of feeling lost in the world so much more bearable. It's like we were a lot of bad cooks spoiling the soup, but we had some fun times doing it. We broke eggs and made omelettes and left the shells on the floor, and you'd think we would have been exhausted by the very effort. But we've actually enjoyed eating our own concoctions together, whenever we had a chance to do so. I can even say none of us would probably have preferred leaving those eggs unbroken, that soup uncooked or unspoilt, or even that womb unbreached. So here we are, waiting for you now, together, even if we're not all in the room at the very moment you emerge (I think your mama and daddy need the other cooks to step away from the range at the very moment when the souffle is being carefully lifted out!). We're all waiting for you, though, you can rest assured of that. We know it's going to be a big struggle for you, especially in those first days. How disorienting those first moments! And we know you'll get just as lost as the rest of us. And we think that's okay — even grand! We're waiting for you now, we're counting on you, and we know you're counting on us. And we'll be here for you when you emerge, and for as long as we can be afterwards. You are loved, you who are yet to emerge, and we think you'll get to know a little more about what that means over time, as you're experiencing your lostness, so very much like ours.

One last thing: in the Jewish tradition, newborn infants are said to possess all the learning of the Talmud, which they then forget as they grow up. It's a big loss, I know. But finding your way to your own wisdom, or lostness, is worth the effort.

Love, love, love from your "uncle" Lincoln.

Saturday, September 10, 2005

Extraordinary times, ordinary politics

While both Democrats and Republicans may be guilty of sweeping their own failures under the carpet and, worse, of seeking political gain in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration has elevated this kind of politics-as-usual to dizzying new heights in its decision to "investigate itself" over the botched federal emergency response, and now, in reports that private contractors snagging the most lucrative New Orleans reconstruction contracts have close ties to the Administration (see also comment #1 on this post).

Maureen Dowd is in full form in her pithy screed (see comment #2) against Administration cronyism — in this case, the kind that gave us FEMA director Michael Brown. Now Time magazine is reporting that not only did Brown have no evident qualifications for his FEMA post; he also appears to have falsified his FindLaw profile (see comment #3) in claiming to have been an "Outstanding Political Science Professor" at Central State University in Oklahoma, when in fact he was only a student there (and possibly worked as an adjunct instructor). His claim to have been a member of the board of directors of the Oklahoma Christian Home, a nursing home, is also in dispute.


President Bush (framed by a presumably serendipitous TV news caption, left: "Bush: One of the Worst Disasters to Hit the U.S.") reacted to the withering criticism of FEMA's missteps by recalling Brown to Washington and effectively relieving him of his duties in the hurricane-stricken region, but not firing him. To take the latter course of action, needless to say, would mean admitting to the complete failure of federal preparedness for this emergency. Once again the nation faces a catastrophe on the Bush watch for which advance notice was available but unheeded. Whereas 9/11 was historically unprecedented, however, Hurricane Katrina was not only entirely predictable but actually expected by government disaster forecasters themselves. The Bush administration deserves to be held to a very different standard for its ineffectual preparation for, and inability to adequately cope with, this disaster.

The federal government's blunders in New Orleans, as Dowd suggests, resulted in days of chaos that recall the unchecked mayhem which followed the US incursion into Baghdad in the spring of 2003. Now that private interests coziest with the Administration, such as Halliburton, have secured major no-bid reconstruction contracts in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, one has the uncanny feeling that we Americans are condemned to endure a great deal more of the very corruption against which our leaders claim to protect us — and the rest of the world.

—Lincoln

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Blameless? Katrina, Race, and Representation

"Race has nothing to do with this disaster." That sentiment is now the official story, echoed in press briefings by high-ranking officials such as Condoleezza Rice and in numberless television talk show commentaries (see comment #1 on this post). How closely does this official line reflect the reality of what has happened since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast?

Not surprisingly, there is no smoking gun that proves that the lag time in federal response to the disaster has had anything to do with race. Yet the distressing images and lopsided demographics of those who endured the chaos of post-hurricane New Orleans suggest that the tell-tale signature of race inheres in the politics of emergency disaster relief as much as it does in other political spheres like electoral campaigns, voting, redistricting, social security, public education, criminal justice, and, above all, local and federal economic policies. In each of these spheres, "race" is a word that dare not speak its name in contemporary American political discourse, despite its continuing social salience and the undeniable evidence of race-specific economic effects that result from supposedly neutral public policy. The socioeconomic impact of race, in turn, is most clearly revealed to Americans at moments of social crisis, such as that precipitated by the fury of Hurricane Katrina.

When Michael Omi and Howard Winant wrote their seminal analysis of the politics of race in American society, Racial Formation in the United States (Routledge 1986, rev'd. 1994), their principal task was to offer an archaeology of the concept of race in the face of overwhelming evidence that racial discourse was being driven underground by the "color-blind" agenda of American neoconservative politics. Omi and Winant describe such amnestic neoconservative politics, and their meliorative (or leveling) neoliberal counterparts, as the most recent iteration of the kinds of "racial projects" that have marked American history since the nation's inception. They warn of the twin temptations of thinking of race as an essence ("fixed, concrete, and objective"), or as a mere illusion, "a purely ideological construct which some ideal non-racist social order would eliminate" (1994:54). They argue that it is necessary, instead, "to understand race as an unstable and 'decentered' complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle" (55).

The only antidote to racism, Omi and Winant insist, is to "notice race" and thereby to "challenge the state, the institutions of civil society, and ourselves as individuals to combat the legacy of inequality and injustice inherited from the past" (159). The images flickering across TV screens since August 29th, when Katrina barreled ashore, were belatedly acknowledged by the corporate media as reflections of a deeper political history of the US and, in particular, of the American South. That history is shaped by racial projects that consist of shifting cultural representations and economic structures. It is as absurd to erase this history as it is to ignore the racial elements of the catastrophe in New Orleans still unfolding before our stunned eyes. While racism in its crudest and most essentialistic form may or may not have tainted the official response to the New Orleans debacle, the aftermath of the storm requires an analysis of race that would help to explain why an extraordinary number of those who were most severely affected are African-Americans; how official relief was meted out among the survivors in direst need; and how the American public at large has reacted to these devastating images and to the unpardonably slow rescue efforts.

A time-line of official responses to the disaster, which suggests the magnitude of federal ineptitude or disregard, can be found here (see also comment #2 below).

Among those who have focused on race as an element of the disaster most in need of explanation is Anya Kamenetz, a freelance author who grew up in New Orleans. She argues in a Village Voice editorial, "My Flood of Tears" (see also comment #3 below), that race has played such an enormous role in the unfolding of events because for New Orleans, more obviously than elsewhere, race is not just a central element of the city's history. It also warps the city's present conditions insofar as the spoils of a racist history are still vastly unevenly distributed.

In a similar vein, Dan Rabinowitz of Haaretz reminds his readers that "catastrophes don't just happen" (see comment #4 below). Rabinowitz sharply admonishes those who refuse to acknowledge the ideological roots of this disaster:

It is impossible to understand [the collapse of order in New Orleans] without relating to poverty and racism. Black people, most of them poor, constituted 68 percent of the population of New Orleans until Katrina arrived, and it was natural that the vast majority of the people without cars who were stuck in the city were black: a weak and weakened population, full of bitterness after generations in which they were abandoned to poverty, ignorance and crime. For these people, the police, the federal authorities, the supermarket chains and the department stores are the enemy. They looted food in order to survive, and took electrical appliances, clothing and shoes to return to themselves, on the backdrop of the disappearing city, something of what White America has always denied them. The social collapse of New Orleans is the shameful fruit of the ideology of "every man for himself," and of the budgetary and political policy — of each individual city and county — that derives from this.

Rabinowitz's biting commentary effectively sums up what I and others have found so shocking about the terrible events themselves and their representation in the corporate media. What is painfully evident to media watchers like myself and to many of the most incisive public editorialists is that the material history of the Katrina tragedy begins long before the end of August 2005. President Bush and his administration, as many have pointed out, began dismembering FEMA in his first term, despite earlier efforts by the Clinton administration to restore the agency to the fiscal health of its earlier years. The Bush administration's cuts to the FEMA budget were part of a relentless "starve the beast" policy of reducing vital government services for poor and working-class Americans while cutting taxes for the wealthiest citizens.

But the problems that turned this natural catastrophe into a societal tragedy go beyond these specific policies and this particular political moment. The responsibility for the grinding poverty of so many New Orleaneans cannot be laid at the feet of a single administration or even a specific political program. The roots of economic inequality in New Orleans, intertwined as they are with the legacy of racist American politics and policy, are planted much deeper in our national history than the major media is generally capable of acknowledging, let alone discussing in any depth. Television snippets and newspaper reports simply cannot adequately address this long, complex, and sordid national experience. And yet, a comprehensive analysis and redressing of this history should not be the task of academics and political activists solely. What is needed is a broad public discussion of race and class as fundamental American concerns in the 21st century — concerns that touch upon the many different layers of public policy, socioeconomic structure, resource distribution, and cultural production. In the absence of such a discussion, the nation will continue to be haunted by its past and unable to critically evaluate its present.



Image: a black man "looting;" white people "finding." (Click on the image above for a larger view.)


Post script: The Onion offers a humorous take on some of the concerns I've addressed here, including issues of race, in a spoof, "God Outdoes Terrorists Yet Again" (see comment #5 below).

News reports today indicate that Cuba has offered to send 1000 doctors to the hurricane stricken region, and that emergency aid has been offered by countries such as Bangladesh ($1m), Venezuela ($1m to the Red Cross), Djibouti ($50k), Azerbaijan ($500k) and Gabon ($500k). That's of course to return the favor of US foreign aid largesse, which in terms of percentage of GNP is the lowest of any industrialized nation in the world.

Lastly, I want to amend, or supplement, my audioblog posted in the wee hours of last Monday morning: the signs of Hurricane Katrina that I missed on re-entering the city of Mobile would have been more obvious had I been driving home during daylight hours. As my friend Becky pointed out, I would merely have had to look across the Bayway at the marina to see boats torn from their moorings and piled up on the shore, helter-skelter, like so much arboreal debris. Becky's boat, too, was badly and perhaps irreparably damaged. Other friends and colleagues of mine suffered even worse: at least one friend had her newly purchased house nearly destroyed by flooding. I am thankful that I, like most residents of the city of Mobile, suffered relatively minor damage compared with that of our unfortunate windward neighbors.

—Lincoln

Monday, September 05, 2005

Return to Mobile

this is an audio post - click to play

Sunday, September 04, 2005

Katrina: Race Against Class?

The Washington Post's Lynne Duke and Teresa Wiltz's essay, "A Nation's Castaways," addresses many of the most relevant issues of race and class that have marked the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe (the text of the article is also available as a comment on this post). An article from Truthout that also addresses some of these issues, by National Lawyers Guild director Marjorie Cohen, asks how Castro's Cuba was able to cope with a hurricane last year that destroyed some 20,000 homes without suffering even a single loss of life.

Duke and Wiltz gather comments from political figures as disparate as Harvard law professor Lani Guinier and Ward Connerly, a former University of California regent and prominent Affirmative Action opponent, who predictably offer contrary views on the racial and class implications of this disaster. Guinier's comments are most cogent: she points out that impoverished African Americans are "the canary in the mine. Poor black people are the throwaway people. And we pathologize them in order to justify our disregard." Even Connerly admits that the images of looting seen on TV are likely to play into longstanding racial stereotypes: "I thought this is only going to fuel the perception," Connerly laments, that "there those people go again."



Russell Adams, a professor of African American studies at Howard University, claims that "The lesson we can take from this is that the society cannot blithely ignore extreme disparities in economic and social situations." But in order for this to happen, argues Noel Ignatiev, editor of the journal Race Traitor, Americans must surmount the racial divide revealed by the hurricane in favor of a new awareness of shared class interests. "Some [Americans] may be awakening to the notion there's no use clinging to an identity that's doing them no good," says Ignatiev. "If white folks start thinking of themselves as poor and dispossessed instead of privileged, it will change the way they act. We will see the beginnings of class conflict."

Whether or not recognizing shared class interests requires, as Ignatiev suggests, dropping racial affiliations, I share his hopes for the rise of a new class awareness. Ongoing racial prejudice and the demographic-political sequestration that resulted from it may be one of the most basic reasons why the US has never had a labor movement as broad or effective as those in other industrialized nations. The question is whether a single catastrophic event like Hurricane Katrina can bring about a real political transformation in which people learn to work together for a more egalitarian society.

—Lincoln

Saturday, September 03, 2005

Katrina, Race, and Class: Part II

A number of major media news articles and television reports have started to appear that directly address race and class issues as inextricable components of this disaster. Among these are David Gonzalez's excellent report in the New York Times, "From Margins of Society to Center of the Tragedy," Reuters' article on the comments of rapper Kanye West during a live NBC-sponsored benefit for the victims of the hurricane, Aaron Kiney's helpful "'Looting' or 'Finding,'" on Salon, which discusses the disparate captioning of photos of blacks and whites in post-hurricane New Orleans, Jack Shafer's comment on Slate about the reticence of the news media to mention race and class explicitly, and others that have since appeared elsewhere (reprinted versions of some of these articles are available as comments on this post).

Alan Wolfe, author of Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It, in an opinion piece also available on Salon (and reprinted as a comment on this blog entry), tries to sum up the contrasting political views of what has happened since New Orleans descended into chaos. He presents the competing attitudes of conservatives and liberals towards acts of "looting" as part of a broader "culture war" in the United States — a war that he ultimately deems trivial compared to the advancements (and, more pointedly, the fragility) of our civilization itself. Civilization's shocking tenuousness, he argues, is what becomes most clearly revealed by catastrophes such as that created by Hurricane Katrina.

Wolfe commits the blunder, to my mind, of focusing so much on his concern for civilizational durability that he problematically underplays the critical contextual issues we Americans, and especially our leaders, must face in the aftermath this debacle. His concluding comment is striking because it so fully shunts aside the deeply local and specific political contexts of this tragedy in favor of meta-discourse on the universal benefits of (presumably Western) civilization:

Some worry that the events unleashed in the aftermath of Katrina will inflame the American culture war. If only we could be so lucky. Our culture war is puny when compared with Hobbes' war of all against all. As we watch the tragedy of Katrina unfold, we are not talking about relatively insignificant matters such as who should marry whom. We are talking about civilization itself, why its invention has been humanity's greatest accomplishment and why we should do everything in our power to protect it. That we have so many people in our midst, including in the seats of power in Washington, who cannot understand what an improvement society is over nature is a tragedy fully as destructive as Katrina's. And when the totality of that tragedy is reckoned, it may cause more death and destruction than nature is capable of doing.

Where, in his conclusion, is there any room for an analysis of the effects of economic disparities that have so exacerbated this catastrophe? Must we not think about why it is that our society, despite its technological and political advances, is so extremely economically unequal and why it still remains divided by what W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903 called "the problem of the color line"? Such issues are not merely, as Wolfe blithely argues, the "relatively insignificant matters such as who should marry whom" (although that kind of question may have much to do with the reasons that economic disparities in this country remain so ingrained). The problems of social and economic inequity exposed by Hurricane Katrina's deadly winds are what have transformed a natural catastrophe into a cultural tragedy — and also, perhaps, an opportunity for broad cultural self-reflection. In the end, Wolfe's views seem to shut down the kind of careful thinking that this national experience ought instead to provoke for all of us. The "culture war" that he trivializes is precisely the kind of political contestation that badly needs to take place as soon as the victims of Katrina are safe, dry, and well fed.

—Lincoln

False Redemption

Maureen Dowd's acerbity in her column today, "The United States of Shame," (also reprinted in a comment on this post) is a welcome relief from MSNBC's relentlessly saccharine reporting; I was watching today as the Bill Gates network played a soaringly redemptive theme song over images of derring-do rescues from rooftops and from — gasp! — the New Orleans Convention Center, where conditions are said to be deteriorating rapidly. Dowd wonders who could possibly not have anticipated a disaster like the one wrought this week by Hurricane Katrina, despite the President's and FEMA director Michael Brown's claims that the federal government was blindsided. Were they caught by surprise, she wonders, because they didn't read the government's own reports of the highly probable potential of such a disaster scenario? Dowd also suggests a further example of implicit racism in official responses to the catastrophe: hotel guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out of town while those enduring infinitely worse conditions in the Convention Center were made to wait.
—Lincoln

Friday, September 02, 2005

Hurricane Katrina, Race and Class: Part I

I have been in Pensacola, Florida since late-Tuesday because my house in Mobile still is without electricity. I'm doing okay here, but I look forward to getting back home as soon as electricity is restored. The University is supposed to reopen on September 6th, but that may change, depending on conditions. Yesterday and today the gas stations here in Pensacola were mainly without gas, and I waited in a long line at the one station that (only briefly) had gas to offer. It's scary to see people begin to panic when basic commodities are in short supply; I can only imagine to what degree such a sense of panic must be magnified nearer to the epicenter, where essential necessities such as water, food, and sanitation are in severe shortage.

From my vantage — geographically and emotionally near the disaster, but safely buffered from its worst deprivations — much of the press coverage has not adequately dealt with the most difficult social issues that mark this still unfolding catastrophe. It is difficult to avoid concluding that one important cause of the slow response to the debacle has to do with the fact that most of the people who are caught up in it are poor and black. Here in Pensacola I keep hearing blame expressed towards the victims: "they should have heeded the call to evacuate." Even the FEMA chief said as much in a news conference today. So where, I must ask, were the busses he should have provided to take them away before Katrina hit? Where were the troops to supervise evacuation? Where were the emergency shelters and health services? People who ought to know better do not seem to understand or acknowledge the enormous differential in available resources — access to transportation, money, information, social services, etc. — that forms the background to this human catastrophe. Terms such as "looting" are tossed about in the press and on TV with no class or race analysis at all. In recent news reports, there is an emerging discussion of the political background to the calamity: the Bush administration's curtailment of federal funding for levee repair in order to pay for the war in Iraq, rampant commercial housing development on environmentally protective wetlands, financial evisceration of FEMA, and so on. But there's been little or no discussion of the economic background that makes New Orleans a kind of "Third World" nation unto itself, with fearsomely deteriorated housing projects, extraordinarily high crime and murder rates, and one of the worst public education systems in the country.

Major newspaper editors and TV producers have prepared very few reports about issues of race in this disaster, and those reports that have appeared so far seem to me deeply insufficient in their analysis of endemic class and race problems. I've been communicating with a national magazine reporter friend of mine since Tuesday night about the issues of race and class in this catastrophe; here's my email comment on this topic from earlier today:

CNN addressed the race question today on TV, but only to ask softball questions of Jesse Jackson, who to his discredit didn't exhibit even a modicum of the anger of one Louisiana black political leader, who said: "While the Administration has spoken of 'shock and awe' in the war on terror, the response to this disaster has been 'shockingly awful.'"

The Washington Post also ran a puff piece that doesn't ask any of the relevant questions, such as whether the Administration's response would have been faster if these were white people suffering the agonies of a slow motion disaster. Here's the link to the Post's piece.

Michael Moore also had this to say in a letter to President Bush circulated today:

No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing — NOTHING — to do with this!

(See Michael Moore's full letter here.)

A member of the Congressional Black Caucus had to remind reporters today to stop referring to those displaced by the flooding with the blanket term "refugees" (recalling, of course, the waves of Haitian or Central American or Southeast Asian refugees who sought shelter in the US): these people are citizens, she said, deserving of the full protections guaranteed to all Americans.



The federal government promised on Wednesday that those receiving food stamps could get their full allotment at the beginning of September, rather than the usual piecemeal distribution throughout the month. How very generous. What these people need is relief money and access to services now — even the 50,000 or so exhausted and traumatized people whose images we've seen at the N.O. Superdome and at the Civic Center are just a few of the far larger number of those residents of the region displaced by the hurricane, many of whom live from monthly paycheck to paycheck. It will be months at the very least before these people can return home; their jobs may be gone for good. The mayor of New Orleans was actually caught off camera crying in frustration today at the slow pace of the federal response.

If there is a hopeful side to this tragedy, it is perhaps that Hurricane Katrina's damage and efforts to relieve those displaced by the storm may spark a wider national discussion about the ongoing and unaddressed issues of race and economic disparity in America. If that doesn't happen, I fear that there will be even further deterioration in the living conditions and economic predicament of those left destitute and homeless by Katrina — a situation in which our own government's years of neglect must be included as a crucial contributing factor. We must not let such a deterioration of conditions for those hardest hit by Katrina occur.

What happens next, when tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans require long-term recovery help, will be an important barometer of our society's ability to heal itself.

—Lincoln