Race and Katrina

Jumping into a discussion of race and class in America is foolhardy. And trying to do it in the "haiku" style of blogging where everything must be reduced to a couple of lines or--at most--a few paragraphs that people can read and respond to during a 10 minute coffee break makes it even more suspect.

But I'm game. And no doubt a fool too :^)

The Obvious Role of Race in New Orleans

Sometimes the pictures tell the story. We've all seen them.

Had a catastrophe like this hit any city in America, most of the dead and displaced would be black and latino. It doesn't take a PhD to figure that out.

The Ambiguous Role of Race in New Orleans

Katrina devastated the whole city and region. The hurricane was no respecter of pigment.

And the relief effort, once it got started, made no distinctions on the basis of skin color.

Incompetence and corruption--from the highest levels of government to the city level--are the best explanation for why the relief effort was so poorly executed and so slow. Our FEMA director was a surprisingly underqualified crony with connections to a highly placed, old college room-mate. That kind of corrupt and arrogant patronage has been true for a long time in Washington. Sadly, it's gotten no better under the current crop of righteous Republicans. Given the unprecedented amounts of pork in some of the bills passed by this Congress, many thoughtful people think it's gotten worse.

Still though, the slowness of the response probably did have something to do with race.

My family and I lived in SoCentral LA during the riots there in the early 90's. That catastrophe had a lot to do with race. Black man beaten savagely by white police officers. White officers declared not guilty by a white jury in the San Fernando Valley. Blacks and Latinos exploding into a fury that burned and destroyed wide sections of the city including my family's neighborhood.

It took the National Guard 3 days to respond in sufficient force to the riots. By that time large parts of the city had been destroyed and lots of people were dead.

What if those angry black and latino people had taken buses to the white west side of LA, which many of them do every day to work as servants and gardeners, and started their angry retaliatory mayhem in Brentwood?

Anybody who thinks it would have taken 2-3 days for National Guard troops to arrive in that instance may not understand the history or sociology of Southern California.

Was New Orleans, a city overwhelmingly populated by poor black people in one of the most historically racist parts of the country, really that different than LA? If New Orleans had been a prosperous and mostly white city, would it have taken many days for help to arrive?

Given the incompetence I mentioned above, maybe. But I wonder.

The Irrelevant Role of Race in New Orleans

Over the past number of years I've lost some of my sympathy for racial explanations.

I'm not even sure, exactly, what the idea of "race" means at this point.

The ideas of "class" and "culture" may explain a lot more about what happened in New Orleans and what's happening in the US and around the world.

That's what I want to get into next time.