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:
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
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
posted by Lincoln Z. Shlensky at 2:35 PM
3 Comments:
The New York Times
September 2, 2005
From Margins of Society to Center of the Tragedy
By DAVID GONZALEZ
The scenes of floating corpses, scavengers fighting for food and desperate throngs seeking any way out of New Orleans have been tragic enough. But for many African-American leaders, there is a growing outrage that many of those still stuck at the center of this tragedy were people who for generations had been pushed to the margins of society.
The victims, they note, were largely black and poor, those who toiled in the background of the tourist havens, living in tumbledown neighborhoods that were long known to be vulnerable to disaster if the levees failed. Without so much as a car or bus fare to escape ahead of time, they found themselves left behind by a failure to plan for their rescue should the dreaded day ever arrive.
"If you know that terror is approaching in terms of hurricanes, and you've already seen the damage they've done in Florida and elsewhere, what in God's name were you thinking?" said the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. "I think a lot of it has to do with race and class. The people affected were largely poor people. Poor, black people."
In the days since neighborhoods and towns along the Gulf Coast were wiped out by the winds and water, there has been a growing sense that race and class are the unspoken markers of who got out and who got stuck. Just as in developing countries where the failures of rural development policies become glaringly clear at times of natural disasters like floods or drought, many national leaders said, some of the United States' poorest cities have been left vulnerable by federal policies.
"No one would have checked on a lot of the black people in these parishes while the sun shined," said Mayor Milton D. Tutwiler of Winstonville, Miss. "So am I surprised that no one has come to help us now? No."
The subject is roiling black-oriented Web sites and message boards, and many black officials say it is a prime subject of conversation around the country. Some African-Americans have described the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina as "our tsunami," while noting that there has yet to be a response equal to that which followed the Asian tragedy.
Roosevelt F. Dorn, the mayor of Inglewood, Calif., and the president of the National Association of Black Mayors, said relief and rescue officials needed to act faster.
"I have a list of black mayors in Mississippi and Alabama who are crying out for help," Mr. Dorn said. "Their cities are gone and they are in despair. And no one has answered their cries."
The Rev. Jesse Jackson said cities had been dismissed by the Bush administration because Mr. Bush received few urban votes.
"Many black people feel that their race, their property conditions and their voting patterns have been a factor in the response," Mr. Jackson said, after meeting with Louisiana officials yesterday. "I'm not saying that myself, but what's self-evident is that you have many poor people without a way out."
In New Orleans, the disaster's impact underscores the intersection of race and class in a city where fully two-thirds of its residents are black and more than a quarter of the city lives in poverty. In the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood, which was inundated by the floodwaters, more than 98 percent of the residents are black and more than a third live in poverty.
Spencer R. Crew, president and chief executive officer of the national Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, said the aftermath of the hurricane would force people to confront inequality.
"Most cities have a hidden or not always talked about poor population, black and white, and most of the time we look past them," Dr. Crew said. "This is a moment in time when we can't look past them. Their plight is coming to the forefront now. They were the ones less able to hop in a car and less able to drive off."
That disparity has been criticized as a "disgrace" by Charles B. Rangel, the senior Democratic congressman from New York City, who said it was made all the worse by the failure of government officials to have planned.
"I assume the president's going to say he got bad intelligence, Mr. Rangel said, adding that the danger to the levees was clear.
"I think that wherever you see poverty, whether it's in the white rural community or the black urban community, you see that the resources have been sucked up into the war and tax cuts for the rich," he said.
Outside Brooklyn Law School yesterday, a man selling recordings of famous African-Americans was upset at the failure to have prepared for the worst. The man, who said his name was Muhammad Ali, drew a damning conclusion about the failure to protect New Orleans.
"Blacks ain't worth it," he said. "New Orleans is a hopeless case."
Among the messages and essays circulating in cyberspace that lament the lost lives and missed opportunities is one by Mark Naison, a white professor of African-American Studies at Fordham University in the Bronx.
"Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws?" Mr. Naison wrote. "If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions."
That sentiment was shared by members of other minority groups who understand the bizarre equality of poverty.
"We tend to think of natural disasters as somehow even-handed, as somehow random," said Martín Espada, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts and poet of a decidedly leftist political bent who is Puerto Rican. "Yet it has always been thus: poor people are in danger. That is what it means to be poor. It's dangerous to be poor. It's dangerous to be black. It's dangerous to be Latino."
This Sunday there will be prayers. In pews from the Gulf Coast to the Northeast, the faithful will come together and pray for those who lived and those who died. They will seek to understand something that has yet to be fully comprehended.
Some may talk of a divine hand behind all of this. But others have already noted the absence of a human one.
"Everything is God's will," said Charles Steele Jr., the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. "But there's a certain amount of common sense that God gives to individuals to prepare for certain things."
That means, Mr. Steele said, not waiting until the eve of crisis.
"Most of the people that live in the neighborhoods that were most vulnerable are black and poor," he said. "So it comes down to a lack of sensitivity on the part of people in Washington that you need to help poor folks. It's as simple as that."
Contributing reporting from New York for this article were Andy Newman, William Yardley, Jonathan P. Hicks, Patrick D. Healy, Diane Cardwell, Anemona Hartocollis, Ronald Smothers, Jeff Leeds, Manny Fernandez and Colin Moynihan. Also contributing were Michael Cooper in Albany, Gretchen Ruethling in Chicago, Brenda Goodman in Atlanta and Carolyn Marshall in San Francisco.
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Reuters - via Yahoo News
Rapper Kanye West blasts Bush on TV benefit show
Sat Sep 3, 4:24 AM ET
Rapper Kanye West surprised viewers of an NBC benefit concert for Hurricane Katrina victims on Friday by accusing President George W. Bush of racism.
"George Bush doesn't care about black people," West said from New York during the show aired live on the East Coast on NBC, MSNBC, CNBC and Pax, just before cameras cut away to comedian Chris Tucker.
West, who is black, suggested moments earlier that delays in providing relief to survivors of the hurricane that hit the U.S. Gulf Coast on Monday and flooded New Orleans were deliberate. He said America was set up "to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off as slow as possible."
The Grammy award-winning singer, who was paired with comedian Mike Myers, also said in what NBC described as unscripted remarks, "We already realized a lot of the people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way, and they've given them permission to go down and shoot us."
He was apparently referring to shoot-on-sight orders issued to National Guard troops to halt violence and looting in New Orleans.
West also criticized the media's portrayal of blacks, saying: "I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family, it says they're looting. See a white family, it says they're looking for food."
In a statement, NBC, a unit of General Electric Co.,said, "Kanye West departed from the scripted comments that were prepared for him, and his opinions in no way represent the views of the networks.
"It would be most unfortunate," the statement continued, "if the efforts of the artists who participated tonight and the generosity of millions of Americans who are helping those in need are overshadowed by one person's opinion."
The program, hosted by Matt Lauer of NBC News, urged viewers to donate to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund. It included 18 presenters, and featured performances by New Orleans natives Harry Connick Jr. and Wynton Marsalis, as well as Louisiana native Tim McGraw and Faith Hill of Mississippi, which was also struck by Katrina.
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Salon.com
"Looting" or "finding"?
Bloggers are outraged over the different captions on photos of blacks and whites in New Orleans.
By Aaron Kinney
Sept. 1, 2005 | Two photographs of New Orleans residents wading through chest-deep water unleashed a wave of chatter among bloggers Wednesday about whether black people are being treated unfairly in media coverage of post-hurricane looting.
One of the images, shot by photographer Dave Martin for the Associated Press, shows a young black man wading through chest-deep waters after "looting" a grocery store, according to the caption. The young man appears to have a case of Pepsi under one arm and a full garbage bag in tow. In the other, similar shot, taken by photographer Chris Graythen for AFP/Getty Images, a white man and a light-skinned woman are shown wading through chest-deep water after "finding" goods including bread and soda, according to the caption, in a local grocery store.
The images were both published on Tuesday by Yahoo News. "We don't edit photo captions," Yahoo P.R. manager Brian Nelson told Salon. "Sometimes we take a look at the photos and we'll choose to pull photos, but the captions run as is." A search of AP and Getty's image databases confirms that Yahoo News did not alter either of the photo captions before posting them online.
Looting has become a serious problem in the aftermath of Katrina, and conditions in the area continue to be extremely challenging for everyone, journalists included. Bloggers were quick to raise allegations of insensitivity and racism regarding the disparity in the two captions -- but did they pass judgment too quickly? Not only did the photos come from separate outlets, bloggers had no knowledge of the circumstances in which the shots were taken, beyond what appeared in the published captions.
On Wednesday, D.C. Web gossip Wonkette suggested the Associated Press should apologize, while a blogger at Daily Kos commented alongside the juxtaposed images, "And don't forget. It's not looting if you're white."
"I am curious how one photographer knew the food was looted by one but not the other," wrote Boston Globe correspondent Christina Pazzanese, in a letter posted on media commentator Jim Romenesko's blog. "Were interviews conducted as they swam by? Should editors, in a rush to publish poignant or startling images, relax their standards or allow personal or regional biases creep into captions and stories?"
The AP database includes two other images from the same scene by photographer Dave Martin that refer to looters in the captions, though neither actually shows an explicit act of looting. Jack Stokes, AP's director of media relations, confirmed today that Martin says he witnessed the people in his images looting a grocery store. "He saw the person go into the shop and take the goods," Stokes said, "and that's why he wrote 'looting' in the caption."
Santiago Lyon, AP's director of photography, told Salon that all captions are vetted by editors and are the result of a dialogue between editor and photographer. Lyon said AP's policy is that each photographer can describe only what he or she actually sees. He added, "When we see people go into businesses and come out with goods, we call it 'looting.'" On the other hand, he said, "When we just see them carrying things down the road, we call it 'carrying items.'"
Regarding the AFP/Getty "finding" photo by Graythen, Getty spokeswoman Bridget Russel said, "This is obviously a big tragedy down there, so we're being careful with how we credit these photos." Russel said that Graythen had discussed the image in question with his editor and that if Graythen didn't witness the two people in the image in the act of looting, then he couldn't say they were looting.
But if he didn't witness an act of looting, how did Graythen determine where the items came from, or if they were "found"? "I wish I could tell you," Russel said. "I haven't been able to talk to Chris."
"The only thing I can tell you is they don't assume one way or another," she added.
Yahoo News published another photo Tuesday of a looting scene that caught bloggers' attention. This one, by AP photographer Bill Feig, shows a white man walking away from a looted convenience store, looking in a grocery bag, while a black man jumps out of the store's broken front window. The caption reads, "As one person looks through their shopping bag, left, another jumps through a broken window, while leaving a convenience store ... in Metairie, La." According to the caption, Feig shot the image while on a helicopter tour of Louisiana with Gov. Kathleen Blanco.
"I think it's fair to say that he described what he saw ... which is somebody going through their bag," Stokes said, affirming that Feig must not have seen the man with the grocery bag actually leaving the looted store.
Both Stokes and Russel said their photographers would be unable to comment further on the images for now, because of the chaos and poor communications conditions prevailing in New Orleans and the surrounding region.
The stakes remain high in the aftermath of this disaster, says Pazzanese. "Seems to me the national 'crisis mode' coverage of Katrina in a predominantly black, poor part of the country presents a number of professional challenges for everyone in the media around the subject of racial and economic sensitivity," she wrote on Romenesko. "Perhaps these photos will stimulate a media 'gut check' as we race to tell the stories of the thousands who lost their lives and livelihoods."
About the writer
Aaron Kinney is an editorial fellow at Salon.
Salon.com
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/09/03/nature_vs_civilization/print.html
The culture war over Katrina
Right-wingers point to blacks looting and see a Hobbesian war of all against all. Liberals see a failure of civilization to help the poorest among us.
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By Alan Wolfe
Sept. 2, 2005 | To make the case for a strong sovereign, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), whom many consider Britain's greatest political philosopher, asked his readers to imagine what would happen in a state of nature. Without authority, he wrote, there would be a perpetual war of all against all, and the conditions of life would be "nasty, brutish, and short."
We no longer have to imagine a state of nature; in the wake of Katrina's devastation, we see one raging full force in our own country. Remove authority, and what you get is what you see: Although there exists a remarkable amount of heroic self-sacrifice and care-giving beyond dedication in New Orleans, humanity's most altruistic instincts are overwhelmed by images of looting, rape, vigilantism, starvation and death.
Responses to Katrina, like responses to Hobbes, can be divided into two broad camps. There are those who say that a state of nature reveals humanity as it really is; we are little more than animals, depraved creatures burdened by sin and self-interest and desperately in need of the firm guidance that only a deity or armed force can provide. For others, by contrast, the state of nature is a reminder of where we would be if we had not invented civilization; we are not animals driven by nature but builders of societies capable of keeping nature at bay. Reminded by anarchy of what a precious achievement civilization is, we transform examples of humans acting at their worst to do everything in power to help them act their best.
Remarkably for a society as modern as the United States, a surprising number of commentators find themselves attracted to the raw brutalities of nature revealed by Katrina. For them, the fact that so many of the victims are black is not just an accident; Africa, and by implications African-Americans, have traditionally been viewed by whites, especially by whites in the South, as one step removed from nature. The ever self-righteous pundits on Fox News find that images of black young men walking off with plasma-screen televisions are just too convenient to ignore. Humans as depraved as these barely deserve our help. "It makes no sense to spend billions of dollars to rebuild a city that's 7 feet under sea level," as House Speaker Dennis Hastert put it. "It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed."
In the state of nature, no one is responsible for you. The situation in New Orleans may look like chaos, our right-wing brethren say, but in reality it is not that different from a market economy in which everyone is responsible for the choices he or she makes. People may be suffering, but, as Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown put it, residents "chose not to leave the city." Left unsaid, but implicit in the idea of choice, is that we ought to be wary of extending too much help to people so unable to act in their own best interest that financial assistance is likely to be wasted on them. Of course, it is easier to choose to leave if you can afford a car, but no one ever said that fairness reigns in the state of nature.
Fairness may not run rampant in the state of nature, but vigilantism does. For every commentator lecturing the poor for looting, others find understandable, and maybe even a touch admirable, those who pick up guns to defend their provisions against -- well, you don't really have to spell out whom they fear. Order is preferable to chaos, but if order can only be maintained by a government that might have to raise taxes and call its National Guard home where it belongs, then perhaps chaos is preferable to order.
There is a perverse logic working here: If Americans learn how hard it is to pacify New Orleans, perhaps they will understand why our military cannot control Baghdad.
By contrast, the residents of New Orleans themselves, and the sympathetic members of the media covering their plight, sum up their political philosophy in one word: "help." That is, in fact, one of the most important words in the history of Western thought. Why shouldn't desperate human beings be deserving of the help the more fortunate can provide them? Once human beings start helping each other, society comes into existence. And once we have society at our disposal, we need no longer sit back and allow disaster to unfurl, irrespective of whether that disaster is caused by nature or our own ignorance.
For those who think this way, the tragedy of Katrina is a human one as well as a natural one. We knew it was coming. Our government anticipated it and even, when it had more funds available to it, developed plans for meeting it. Far from being responsible for their own plight, the victims are innocent; blame instead belongs to those who cut the funding for disaster relief, sent the troops out to wreak havoc abroad rather than keep order at home, and were so slow to respond because they lacked the empathy to put themselves in the place of those so unlike themselves.
Socially created, Katrina's chaos can be socially cured. Horrifying as its stories are, they will serve a positive purpose if we use them to talk about race, poverty and disaster planning. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake launched the Enlightenment; since a good God could not have killed so many innocent people, philosophers began to argue that humans were themselves responsible for the good and evil around them. Hurricane Katrina's devastation could have the same consequence: If government could have prevented it, and if government is required for dealing with it, then could we not at the least stop bashing government? Government, for modern people like us, is civilization; it is what keeps us from descending into the state of nature that, like Lake Pontchartrain, threatens the earthly city in which we live.
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.
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About the writer
Alan Wolfe is the author of "Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It."
In times of crisis in the past, the Governor of the State was in charge of declaring a state of emergency. The next step in this procedure was to send in the National Guard with orders to shoot looters. What happened to law and order? It doesn't matter what race the looters are they are taking advantage aof a bad situation for all. The Governor let her state down by waiting to send in the troops to keep law and order. Fuzzy thinking does not help this situation. The thing to ask yourself is; Would you take advantage of this situation and loot someone else's property? Now lets get on with getting help to these unfortunate people.
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