LA Times Vulnerable Hit Hardest by Katrina, Study Says

"Poor African American residents of New Orleans were disproportionately displaced by Hurricane Katrina, a study released Thursday confirmed."

"The study raised questions about who would be able to return to New Orleans as it rebuilds. Examining the social differences among the city's 13 planning districts and 72 neighborhoods, Logan found that New Orleans was at risk of losing as much as 80% of its black population.

"The suffering from the storm certainly cut across racial and class lines," Logan said. "But the odds of living in a damaged area were clearly much greater for blacks, residents who rented their homes and poor people.""

redux [09.05.05]
The New York Times Amid Criticism of Federal Efforts, Charges of Racism Are Lodged
[requires 'free' registration]

""Are you telling me we can coordinate a relief effort on the other side of the world and we can't do it here?" I. V. Hilliard, pastor of the New Light Christian Center Church in northern Houston, thundered from the pulpit of his megachurch on Sunday morning. "I'm not saying they didn't care. I'm saying they didn't care enough!"

"I can't help but think that race has something to do with it," he added to a chorus of amens."

"Criticism of the response is coming not only from black members of Congress and national civil rights leaders, but also from prominent local officials and ordinary residents here."

CBS News Rice: Race Not An Issue In Efforts

"Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended President Bush on Sunday against charges that the government's sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina showed racial insensitivity.

"Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race," the administration's highest-ranking black said as she toured damaged parts of her native Alabama.""

The Seattle Times Was rescue a race, class issue?

"Some, including local political and community leaders, were unwilling to call the government's action racist, suggesting it might be more a case of incompetence.

But others compared the government's performance this week to its faster response to the devastating hurricanes that hit South Florida last year. They pointed out that the states in Katrina's path don't have the money and political connections that Florida does. Many were especially critical of President Bush."

"Rosalund Jenkins, executive director of the State Commission on African American Affairs, said: "I'll say it if nobody else is willing. I happen to think if those tens of thousands had been 90 percent white and 10 percent black instead of the other way around, the government's response would've been faster.""

Joel Achenbach Race and Katrina

"There are many types of racism, including the type that says there's no racism in America anymore, and the situation would be precisely the same if the victims all looked like Macauley Culkin. Then there's institutional racism: We have to ask whether the government would have been better prepared for this sort of situation in New Orleans if the most vulnerable communities hadn't been, for the most part, black neighborhoods. (Like, were the levees considered good enough for "the black part of town?") [The Chicago Tribune ran a graphic showing elevation and demographics in New Orleans; to a striking degree the areas below sea level are predominantly African American.]"

Washington Post A Nation's Castaways

"The history of marginalizing black folk in America, especially poor ones, runs so deep that it occurs like second nature. It is one reason, say several prominent black intellectuals, that the response to the devastation of Katrina was so slow.

Racism runs "so deep that the folks who are slow to respond can't see it," says Russell Adams, professor of Afro-American studies at Howard University. "That's the unperceived character of racial behavior, of what I would call hidden racism where you don't know that this situation has a racial character to it, just like fish have trouble defining water.""

Chicago Sun-Times Was race a factor in crisis?

"When 80 percent of the city's population, according to the mayor, evacuated before the hurricane, left behind were those with no cars, no resources, no way out. Twenty-one percent of Orleans Parish households earn less than $10,000 a year. Nearly 27,000 families are below the poverty level. Most of them are black."

"The images of the black poor struggling in New Orleans' chaos should be ''a powerful wake-up call,'' said Dr. Jeff Johnson, a professor at the University of Maryland's School of Medicine.

"The message is that these people are in some sense abandoned, and that's why they're so angry," he said, "but that abandonment occurred not just around this storm. They've been abandoned by our society in the last decade."

redux [09.01.05]
The New York Times The Storm After the Storm
[requires 'free' registration]

"Hurricanes come in two waves. First comes the rainstorm, and then comes what the historian John Barry calls the "human storm" - the recriminations, the political conflict and the battle over compensation. Floods wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities. When you look back over the meteorological turbulence in this nation's history, it's striking how often political turbulence followed."

"We'd like to think that the stories of hurricanes and floods are always stories of people rallying together to give aid and comfort. And, indeed, each of America's great floods has prompted a popular response both generous and inspiring. But floods are also civic examinations. Amid all the stories that recur with every disaster - tales of sudden death and miraculous survival, the displacement and the disease - there is also the testing.

Civic arrangements work or they fail. Leaders are found worthy or wanting. What's happening in New Orleans and Mississippi today is a human tragedy. But take a close look at the people you see wandering, devastated, around New Orleans: they are predominantly black and poor. The political disturbances are still to come."

Wikipedia Great Mississippi Flood

"In the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 the Mississippi River broke out of its levee system in 145 places and flooded 27,000 square miles or about 16,570,627 acres (70,000 km²). The area was inundated up to a depth of 30 feet (10 m). The flood caused over $400 million in damages and killed 246 people in seven states.

By August 1927 the flood subsided. During the disaster 700,000 people were displaced, including 330,000 African-Americans who were moved to 154 relief camps. Many African-Americans were detained and forced to labor at gunpoint during flood relief efforts. The aftermath of the flood was one factor in the Great Migration of African-Americans to northern cities."

American Experience Fatal Flood

"In the spring of 1927, after weeks of incessant rains, the Mississippi River went on a rampage. Racing south from Cairo, Illinois, the river blew away levee after levee, inundating thousands of farms and hundreds of towns, killing as many as a thousand people and leaving nearly a million homeless. By the time it reached New Orleans, the flood had not only altered the landscape of 27,000 square miles-an area the size of four New England States-it had widened the abyss of race relations in the Deep South."

Guardian Unlimited Unrest Intensifies at Superdome Shelter

"We are out here like pure animals. We don't have help," the Rev. Issac Clark, 68, said outside the New Orleans Convention Center, complaining that he and others were evacuated, taken to the convention hall by bus, dropped off and given nothing."

""I don't treat my dog like that," 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. "I buried my dog." He added: "You can do everything for other countries but you can't do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military but you can't get them down here."

Slate Lost in the Flood

"I can't say I saw everything that the TV newscasters pumped out about Katrina, but I viewed enough repeated segments to say with 90 percent confidence that broadcasters covering the New Orleans end of the disaster demurred from mentioning two topics that must have occurred to every sentient viewer: race and class."

"When disaster strikes, Americans—especially journalists—like to pretend that no matter who gets hit, no matter what race, color, creed, or socioeconomic level they hail from, we're all in it together."

"But we aren't one united race, we aren't one united class, and Katrina didn't hit all folks equally. By failing to acknowledge upfront that black New Orleanians—and perhaps black Mississippians—suffered more from Katrina than whites, the TV talkers may escape potential accusations that they're racist. But by ignoring race and class, they boot the journalistic opportunity to bring attention to the disenfranchisement of a whole definable segment of the population. What I wouldn't pay to hear a Fox anchor ask, "Say, Bob, why are these African-Americans so poor to begin with?""

Salon "Looting" or "finding"?

" 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 Ascent Blog Southern Discomfort & the Arrogance of the Presidency...

"Just weeks ago, this blog placed focus on the grueling level of poverty in New Orleans, LA ("Black Eye in the Big Easy," 8.5.05) while contemplating the political fate of Congressman Jefferson (D-LA) in the face of an FBI probe. It was clearly an issue few cared to discuss at that time, but here we are. Why be surprised? Prior to Katrina, New Orleans was just as devastated by entrenched poverty, racism, political corruption, burgeoning unemployment and environmental waste in disregarded urban communities. Is it any wonder we now find the Big Easy gripped by rampaging bands of that Bad Apple 10 percent of the population that just can't help itself? The collective patience of New Orleans was running thin long before Katrina. It just took a natural disaster to shed light on the enduring plight of the Deep South's poor."