|
Unquestionably, the recent Hurricane Katrina was the largest natural disaster in U.S. history. Yet, contrary to the assertions of President George W. Bush that no one could have "anticipated the breach of [New Orleans’s] levees" and the massive flooding and destruction of one of America’s historic cities in the wake of a major hurricane, the catastrophe we have witnessed was widely predicted for decades.
A 2002 special report of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, for example, warned, "It’s only a matter of time before South Louisiana takes a direct hit from a major hurricane... Levees, our best protection from flooding, may turn against us." The Times-Picayune predicted that such a disaster might "decimate the region" from flooding, and that in New Orleans, "100,000 will be left to face the fury." That same year, in a New York Times editorial opinion, writer Adam Cohen predicted coldly, "If the Big One hits, New Orleans could disappear." A direct major hurricane strike, Cohen estimated, would certainly force Lake Pontchartrain’s waters "over levees and into the city . . . there could be 100,000 deaths." Thousands "could be stranded on roofs, surrounded by a witches brew of contaminated water."
A natural disaster for New Orleans was statistically inevitable. But what made the New Orleans tragedy an "unnatural disaster" was the Federal government’s gross incompetence and indifference in preparing the necessary measures to preserve the lives and property of hundreds of thousands of its citizens. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), established in 1979, has been plagued for years with financial mismanagement, administrative incompetence, and cronyism.
The litany of FEMA’s bureaucratic blunders has been amply documented: its insistence that vital supplies of food, water, and medical aid were impossible to deliver to thousands of people stranded at New Orleans’s downtown Morial Convention Center, though entertainers and reporters easily reached the site; its inability to rescue thousands of residents marooned on the roofs and in flooded houses for days; the failure to seek deployment of active duty troops in large numbers until three days after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast region.
But the incompetence goes deeper than that. FEMA Director Michael Brown actually instructed fire departments in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama not to send emergency vehicles or personnel into devastated areas unless local or state officials communicated specific requests for them--at a time when most towns and cities lacked working telephones, fax machines and internet access. Florida’s proposal to send 500 airboats to assist rescue efforts was blocked by FEMA. Thousands of urgently needed generators, communications equipment, trailers and freight cars of food went undelivered for weeks. Meanwhile, hundreds of dead bodies floated in New Orleans’s streets and rotted in desolated houses. Millions of desperate Americans who attempted to phone FEMA’s 800 telephone number for assistance heard recorded messages that all lines were busy, or were disconnected.
Even before Katrina struck, it was obvious that the overwhelming majority of New Orleans residents who would be trapped inside the city to face the deluge would be poor and working class African Americans, who comprised nearly seventy percent of the city’s population. As the levees collapsed and the city’s Ninth Ward flooded, tens of thousands of evacuees were herded into the Superdome and Convention Center, where they were forced to endure days without toilets and running water, food, electricity and medical help. Hundreds of Black evacuees seeking escape on a bridge across the Mississippi River were confronted and forcibly pushed back into the city. One paramedic witnessing the incident stated: "I believe it was racism. It was callousness, it was cruelty."
As the media began to document this unprecedented tragedy, the vast majority of New Orleans’s victims were "the faces at the bottom of America’s well--the poor, Black and disabled," as reporters Monica Haynes and Erv Dyer of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette observed. "The indelible television images of mostly black people living in subhuman conditions for nearly a week have prompted some to ask whether race played a role in how quickly or how not-so-quickly federal and state agencies responded in [Katrina’s] aftermath."
It was governmental incompetence, and bureaucratic mismanagement and its refusal to channel resources to the region’s truly disadvantaged that turned Hurricane Katrina into an unnatural disaster of race and class destruction.
| |
Racism has always been pervasive in the American media’s representation of Black people. Yet it took the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina to illustrate to the entire world how racial stereotyping can turn a natural disaster into an unnatural disaster of race and class.
In one well-publicized example, the Associated Press released two photographs of New Orleans residents, wading through chest-deep water, carrying food obtained from a grocery store. The Whites were described as carrying "bread and soda from a local grocery store" that they found; the Black man pictured was characterized as having "loot[ed] a grocery store." A London Financial Times reporter, on Sept. 5, 2005, declared New Orleans had become "a city of rape" and "a war zone," with thousands subjected to "looting" and "arson."
Administrators in Homeland Security and FEMA justified their lack of emergency aid by claiming that they had not anticipated that "people would loot gun stores . . . and shoot at police, rescue officials and helicopters." The flood of racialized images of a terrorized, crime-engulfed city prompted hundreds of White ambulance drivers and emergency personnel to refuse to enter the New Orleans disaster zone.
Television reports locally and nationally quickly proliferated false exposés about "babies in the Convention Center who got their throats cut" and "armed hordes" high-jacking ambulances and trucks. Baton Rouge’s mayor Kip Holden imposed a strict curfew on its facility that held evacuees, warning of possible violence by "New Orleans thugs." That none of these sensationalized stories were true hardly mattered: as Matt Welch of on-line Reason noted, the "deadly bigotry" of the media probably helped to "kill Katrina victims."
The terrible destruction of thousands of homes and businesses, and relocation of over one million New Orleans and Gulf area residents, was perceived as a golden opportunity by corporate and conservative political elites who had long desired to "remake" the historic city. Even before the corpses of Black victims had been cleared from New Orleans’s flooded streets, corporations closely associated with George W. Bush’s administration eagerly secured non-competitive, multi-billion dollar reconstruction contracts.
Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, for example, was awarded the contract to reconstruct Louisiana and Mississippi naval bases. Bechtel was authorized to provide short-term housing for several hundred thousand displaced evacuees. Shaw, the Louisiana engineering corporation, received lucrative contracts for rebuilding throughout the area. Bush waived provisions of the Davis-Bacon Act, allowing corporations to hire workers below the minimum wage. After Congress authorized over $100 billion for the region’s reconstruction, Halliburton’s stock price surged on Wall Street. Local corporate subcontractors and developers who directly profited from federal subsidies set into motion plans for what local African Americans feared could quickly become a gentrification removal of thousands of Black households from devastated urban neighborhoods. Their pain would be translated into billions of dollars in profits for others.
Behind these corporate plans to "rebuild" New Orleans may also be racially-inspired objectives by Republicans to reduce the size of the city’s all-Black voting precincts. About 60 percent of New Orleans’s electorate is African-American, which normally turns out at 50 percent in local elections. All-White affluent neighborhoods have turnout rates exceeding 70 percent. In the 1994 mayoral race, only six percent of the city’s White voters supported successful Black candidate Marc Morial.
African-American political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson has speculated that "the loss of thousands of black votes" could easily "crack the thirty years of black, and Democratic dominance of City Hall in New Orleans." The seat of Black Democrat William Jefferson, who represents the city in Congress, could now be in jeopardy.
Even more seriously, Hutchinson observed, the massive African-American vote in New Orleans in 2000 and 2004 "enabled Democrats to bag many top state and local offices, but just narrowly. A shift of a few thousand votes could tip those offices back to Republicans."
Editor’s note: Dr. Manning Marable is Professor of Public Affairs and History, and Directory of the Center for Contemporary Black History at Columbia University, New York City. Along the Color Line is distributed internationally, and available at www.manningmarable.net.
|
