Are hurricanes racist?

  • “It looks like the Hous­ton and Galve­ston area has really lucked out,” said Max May­field, direc­tor of the hur­ri­cane center.

    That came from this arti­cle about Hur­ri­cane Rita, and now we know for sure that racism played a fac­tor in the paths of the hur­ri­canes. Whites were spared in Texas; blacks weren’t in Louisiana. Racism.

    Right?

    No, of course not. It’s stu­pid. But if it weren’t com­pletely ludi­crous, and I mean com­pletely, totally, absolutely, we’d all have to go through this.

    I won’t go on and on. We all know the dia­logue that’s been hap­pen­ing in the wake of Kat­rina, we all know we’ll have to hear about this for at least another year as if Amer­ica in 2005 were the same as Alabama in 1950 or ante­bel­lum Dixie.

    I fig­ured out some­thing about how the issue changes for lib­er­als and non-liberals (not even con­ser­v­a­tives. I know a lot of peo­ple that align with lib­er­als on every­thing else but this). Or maybe I’d have to define the sub-set of lib­er­al­ism even more nar­rowly: there are peo­ple who see racism every­where (PWSRE) and peo­ple who don’t.

    When some­thing bad hap­pens — change in the weather, change in the econ­omy, change in the national rhetoric — that affects black peo­ple more than it affects non-black peo­ple, the PWSRE know that it is because of racism. The rest of us think that it might be racism.

    I don’t dis­count that racism exists. I just think that its effects have been grossly exag­ger­ated at the cost of accu­racy, self-respect for blacks and whites and soci­etal har­mony. When Kat­rina hit and those left behind were over­whelm­ingly black, elderly, impov­er­ished and/or infirm, the PWSRE knew that it was racism, and then went on from there. As always hap­pens, when they had unfurled the ban­ners, sounded the charge, gone trum­pet­ing over sev­eral hills and then noticed that the whole coun­try wasn’t behind them, they pro­claimed that we were all racist, that we must want black peo­ple to die. It’s the kind of gross insult to our char­ac­ter (not to men­tion our intel­li­gence) that we’ve got­ten so used to hear­ing that we hardly notice any­more. “Yeah, okay. What­ever.” You can’t argue with peo­ple who are so far off-base, and so high on their own pure vit­riol and pas­sion that rea­son and ratio­nal­ity seem like dis­tant stars.

    But just for the sake of accu­racy, I’ll say it here in my tiny lit­tle cor­ner of thought: the rea­son every­one doesn’t agree isn’t because we don’t have eyes and hearts that work as well as their own. It’s because when we saw the out­come of Kat­rina we only thought that it might be racism. But when we thought about what else might be involved, we thought about what else might be a fac­tor, we reflected on the dire and ever-present con­se­quences of poverty for peo­ple of all races. (And think­ing that, many of us didn’t blame George Bush or our gov­ern­ment and we didn’t feel guilty for not being poor. There are always poor peo­ple. The Lord said we would have them with us always. )

    We thought about how we’ve seen in many cities that the poor blacks and the elderly and infirm of mixed races tend to grav­i­tate to cer­tain neigh­bor­hoods — they seg­re­gate them­selves, as blacks have been doing for some time, being mere human beings like those of other races that are reaf­firmed the most by inter­act­ing with those of their own group. Not a very sophis­ti­cated human ten­dency, and one that whites work to over­come with vary­ing degrees of suc­cess. But a com­mon trait to all races in any case.

    And if other peo­ple were like me, they also thought of peo­ple who are in a ter­ri­ble sit­u­a­tion and yet won’t yield to any attempts to bring them out of it. Those peo­ple (black and white) were still in New Orleans even after the evac­u­a­tion of the Super­dome and many had to be almost threat­ened before they would leave.

    We thought of that and the many other ways that we’re all in this together. And think­ing that, we went to work. We will again.


    Related posts:

    1. Another story you won’t see in the NYT
    2. Sto­ries you won’t see in the NYT
    3. After Kat­rina
    4. Dev­as­ta­tion
    5. Sen­a­tor Lan­drieu about can-do

    September 24th, 2005 | Grace | No Comments |

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