The Wormy Heart
by Eric Stiens
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it strikes me that as a nation, the U.S. still isn’t very good about talking about issues of race and class, and more to the point, isn’t very good talking about structures and policies and their impact on people’s lives.
We are sometimes good about asking questions based around intent and immediate cause and effect– Why did Bush slash FEMA’s budget and divert money from the effort to strengthen the levees even when reports sitting on his desk warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was a likely catastrophic disaster in the US? How come the head of FEMA has zero disaster management experience? Why did their disaster response suck so bad? Specifically, If we have been pouring money into Homeland Security to respond in an effective way to a massive crisis, why was the response in New Orleans and around the Gulf Coast so inadequate? Did that guy really compare New Orelans and Somalia and call refugees “insurgents?” And why are all of our troops in Iraq anyway? Why were volunteer firefighters used for Bush photo-ops rather than disaster relief? Some people were talking about the racial justice implications of hurricane evacuation efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Ivan — why didn’t we listen then?
We are less good at asking, much less answering, the harder questions. Why is there so much racialized concentrated poverty is the US? Why do other countries, faced with similar disasters, respond so differently? Can policies and structures, even seemingly neutral structures, further inscribe white privilege into our national fabric? What evil secrets that we dare not speak of – the loss of a culture of mutuality, the valorization of greed and consumption by some means and not by others, the deep seated race and class caste systems that constantly operate below the surface of life in the US – were laid bare by this tragedy, and how do we talk about them?
Because in the end it’s clear that George Bush and his mom don’t care about black people, it’s clear that there was disastrous mismanagement here, but it’s also clear that a lot of the nastiness floating around the Gulf right now goes a lot deeper than this president, goes deeper than specific decisions which may or may not have had racial intent (I don’t have much respect for this administration, but I’m not callous enough to think they gathered in a room and said, “well shit, they’re black and poor, let’s not do anything for a few days, eh?) goes deeper than the morality of looting — it gets to the wormy heart of US society, US culture.
Here’s some folks starting to break open the discussion a bit and connect Hurricane Katrina with the larger problem of white supremacy in this country:
Joan Walsh, in Salon, writes an exceptional piece about how “[t]he crisis unfolding before us — dispossession, looting, people shooting at rescue workers, the president’s dim response, and now, people dying in front of our eyes outside the Superdome — rubs our noses in so much that’s wrong in our country, it’s excruciating to watch. But I’m especially struck by the inability of our existing political discourse to describe, let alone to solve, the intractable social problems that have come together in this flood whose proportions and portents seem almost biblical.”
Rosa Brooks, in the LA Times, talks about how “[t]he media focus on Hurricane Katrina’s victims has washed away the wall that hid the nation’s impoverished from the rest of us.”
Malik Rahim, a long time Black Panther Party organizer and current Green Party member living and organizing in New Orleans talks about the lack of organizing following the disaster.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson connects the aftermath of Katrina to the larger problem of racialized poverty in the US.
Michael Albert writes that “The accurate Katrina headline is: Storm Hits, Capitalism Preserves Profits, Humanity Drowns.”