'Killing Them Softly': Race, Class and Hurricane Katrina
by Wahneema Lubiano
September 6, 2005“Accompanying her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, on a tour of hurricane relief centers in Houston, Barbara Bush said today, referring to the poor who had lost everything back home and evacuated, “This is working very well for them. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know were underprivileged anyway, so this–this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them.”
The politics of life and death are articulated in public and private conversations, in allusions to past and present history, in unacknowledged desires and fears, as well as in the movements and undertakings of the powerful. In these private and public conversations, allusions, desires and fears, movements, and undertakings, race is not only race, class is not only class. And as people talk in this moment they don’t always express or even know what they want or fear as they’re wanting something or terrified by something. And always, always, power is directing our attention to something other than itself–unless, of course, it needs to show itself as something that comforts. The disaster (both natural and unnatural), the responses to this disaster, and the huge public conversation about the disaster is revealing and heightening the contradictions already present in our social order. And the history of those contradictions.
Many things have gone on in the response to Katrina:
Things including war on the poor, which is business as usual for this social order. Those who were already poor (employed or not) when Katrina hit are certainly poorer in the wake of the disaster.
Things including both the dynamics of racism in movements and undertakings and the expressions of racism in the large conversation.
Things including the fierce and generally unacknowledged messiness of the dynamics of racism and classism and the entangling of race and class concepts that live both in those confusions and in material life. Racism treats all racialized others (regardless of class position) as if they are the lower class, the dangerous class, made visible. And if race is the uneasily but still recognizable (to the general public understanding) social determination, class, of course, is the social ordering and determination that is most often treated as simply a limitor of consumer choices.
What it is possible to see and hear in the vicious, or stumbling, or confused, or simply inarticulate expressions from various people [archive: newspaper reportages, opinion, and letters to the editor, media, online discussion fora, conversations] about what was and is happening along the Gulf Coast is the imagination run wild and fearful. Many members of the U.S. public were unable to “see” Latinos/Latinas, Asian-Americans and Asians–members, for example, of a Vietnamese congregation trapped in their church, poor white people, abandoned foreign tourists – the vision of complexity is wiped out by the “darkness” so thoroughly on display, so thoroughly and simplistically discussed.
Racism side-swipes the usually non-raced (poor white people), or the lightly-raced (Latinos/Latinas, Asians and Asian Americans, etc.), or the accidentally and transiently raced (foreign tourists trapped by the disaster). The heterogeneity of the trapped is matched by the multiplicity of the forms of entrappment., by what was already in place, or, more to the point, by what wasn’t already in place–but the complexities are covered by the shadow cast by the people so multiply black.
Among those things that were devastatingly in place were plans and responsibility for a New Orleans evacuation that were privatized--controlled by a private contractor, IEM, that is a consultant to FEMA. But what was most devastatingly already in place was the softest of soft targets–the already poor. One discussant on the Left Business Observer list-serv referred to the criminal negligence of the U.S. government’s response as “killing them softly.” What wasn’t in place: an economic safety net for the poor to begin with, and regard for what that lack means in the midst of a disaster.
But the middle classes and much of the upper classes –in short, anyone whose assets stop short of helicopter or private jet ownership or access to same and who might someday need to get out of town or might need to have help in a disaster or crisis ought to be a little anxious right now. (I’m talking about all of us right now.) What many see as the criminal negligence of FEMA’s [archive: FEMA guideslines, FEMA regulations, various newspaper articles, government documents, letter from Louisiana governor to the President via Homeland Security, etc.] operations is also, I think, a form of disciplining aimed at the not-poor and/or the not-black as well who are not part of this disaster but are consuming it and its lessons from afar. Black poor people, and other poor or event just temporarily poor people, are the canaries in the coal mine. This government is in the process of abandoning us all to varying degrees. And it is that variance that is malleable and mitigated by the specifics of class and/or race.
Whether you are hitchhiking out of a disaster, driving out in a Honda or a Porsche, the structural horrors (material, economic, political) of the devastation of the Gulf Coast now will stretch out its tendrils to all of us. While the thickness and shape of the tendrils of a disaster will be affected by mitigating factors, what we will increasingly have in common is our rotting infrastructures and the abandonment of a sense of common good materially manifested by our government. (And the material consequences of the destruction of that region will hit us all even if unequally so.)
That abandonment of some notion of a common good has shown up for decades in the public acceptance of U.S. disregard for the outside world. Disregard isn’t containable–it travels out to the world and comes back home too. What we’ve been willing to support in the spread of this and past governments’ brutalizing of other countries, other people, has brutalized our own imaginations of what we are as a social order.
The present hyper-visibilities – the plight of specific kinds of people in this moment as well as the specifics of expressions of racism directed at black Americans, in addition to what I call the flickering visibilities – the plight of poor white people, of temporarily poor people (displaced tourists; medical professionals, other helpers), could be a goad to constituting an alternative to the idea of everyone for him or her individual self.
But there’s noise that interferes with that signal. When George Bush was talking about rebuilding the house of Trent Lott and sitting on the porch with Lott, this language acted as a shout-out to the racist part of this administration’s base because, whatever the complexities of the actually existing Trent Lott, he resonates across the white supremacist U.S. as a defender of segregation [archive: newspapers, magazines, online fora (eg. The Free Republic.com), everyday discussions, etc.]. The resounding noise of that shout-out helps provide cover for the privatization of reconstruction (Hello Halliburton) [archive: government documents, newspaper accounts, official correspondence, etc.] and disaster management (Hello IEM) [IEM Press Release, New Orleans Times-Picayune article], and a reward to the refiners via the lifting of environmental protections [various newspaper articles, White House Press Release] – an enrichment that is a shoutout to the richest part of Bush’s base.
The casual throwaway racist language of “savages running wild”, of “people who should be grateful that the disaster will provide them with a better life” in the Astrodome; the cliches about black welfare dependency and the bad behavior of “those people” showing that they can’t really be saved [archive: huge volume of newspaper letters to the editor, online fora, everyday conversations], and the willingness of those in charge of recovery simply throwing food and water [archive: newspapers, television footage; online fora] at victims of this storm–all of these things and more provide cover for other forms of class warfare on the part of the powerful and cover for the work of dismantling, one disaster or crisis at a time if necessary, the idea that our social order can expect its government [archive: conservative position papers; conservative magazines (eg. The American Spectator), online fora] to do more for its citizenry than to usher public money to what it sees as that money’s “rightful” owners, the corporations that paid for the heads of that government’s election.
The response to this disaster does not have to be actually racist; racism is so much a part of our culture that it is always available as a simple tool of convenience. It can be called onto duty and then dismissed. One of the jobs that it does terrifically well, again and again, is to divert attention from what else is happening. The public imagination was focused on the scary blackness of people massed at the Superdome or the Convention Center, standing on the highway, standing on roofs. That vivid visibility also pushes the other people (in their heterogeneity) also there out of the picture frame until they are pulled into the picture as representations of the not-black and scary “properly” behaving fictions. I am describing a relay of framing movement as these “proper” victims are contrasted to those people spectacularly on display as visible contrasts to the “lawless” and the “looters” of New Orleans.
Late last night I was taking a break from obsessing on the internet and saw Tucker Carlson on CNN doing up a follow-up interview with Andre Broussard (president of Jefferson Parish ) who, on Sunday, had broken down crying after criticizing the federal government on “Meet the Press.” Carlson asked Broussard to comment on the awfulness of the looting in New Orleans (cue pictures of burning buildings in NO), and Broussard said, “well, some of that is going on here too. Our shopping center burned on Wednesday.” Broussard went on to describe what the police and national guard were having to contend with in his area.
It was a moment when the possibility of bad non-black actors was at least alluded to. It was also a moment that passed really quickly.
The comfortably well-off U.S. (and/or those who simply want comfort and aren’t too particular about what it costs in other people) – can have that desire for comfort fed by the disciplining of the visible poor – the dangerous classes.
I want to be clear, so I’m going to say this as directly as I can. I’m bringing together four areas of concern: (1) the presence of racism does not mean the absence of class warfare against the poor and working class; (2) a war on the poor does not mean that people of considerable color aren’talso the easier targets; (3) the analytic insufficiency of a U.S. black/white binary around racial thinking does not mean that other “others” can’t be thought about; and (4) the attention being paid to particular subsets of objects of governmental criminal negligence does not mean we shouldn’t all be terrified of the closing down of idea of a common good.
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I’m going to finish here with some attention to “looting” – both the idea and the activity. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger." -- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials.
The September 2nd - 5th weekend edition of USA Today (online) ran as one of its sub- headline (in the online edition, it was to the right of the main headline): “Lawlessness Fosters Fear.” A word here about lawlessness and its class belonging. If we are not a lawless nation from the very top of our government’s hierarchy, I don’t know what we are. (Actually existing criminals ought to be indignant at the expressions of hypocrisy.) We are up to our noses in a lawless war gerry-rigged by lies; we are led by an administration for whom laws and regulations that get in the way of the good of corporations are routinely ground under its wheels; the engine of help that took its time getting to the disaster region is a product of that lawlessness and disregard for its people. Our attention is being directed to the lawlessness of individuals, and we respond with fear: “that could happen here, that could happen to me.” And we are gratified when “order” is talked about and seems to have been restored. Sometimes all that is required for the achievement of that satisfaction is to see a black male lying on the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back [archive: newspapers, television, online fora, conversation].
In the meantime, we are at the mercy of a lawless over-class that is looting the state and a state that is looting itself for its friends (yet another Hello to Halliburton) and that is invisible to us. The reek of sanctimoniousness and self-righteousness that is drifting outward from the haves of the Bush administration and condemning not only looters, people who “didn’t have the sense to leave,” the local governments, and the poor–the poor , who Barbara Bush tells us are better off now that they’re in the Astrodome than they’ve ever been in their lives–well, the stench of that self-righteousness rivals for noxiousness the smell of shit from the NO Superdome and Convention Center that people there had to breathe for almost a week.
In the U.S. state we seem to be really particular about our tolerance of looters. In fact, we have a tiered system for even thinking about them. Within this community of thought, the absolute bottom is occupied by people who steal TVs. The lowest of that low are those who might barter the TVs for drugs; slightly above them (but still lower than a snake’s belt buckle) are those who steal TVs and might barter them for water, money, clothing, etc.; rising above them are those who are looting food, water, shoes, clothing for their own use or that of others’ close to them (who nonetheless, President Bush told us, should be included in the most dire penalty for looting).
By contrast, occupying the very top tier of looters would be the big state actors, like the Bush administration, looting the national budget for its illegal war and accompanied by the war and disaster profiteers who are engorging themselves and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future but who, I admit, aren’t often photographed carrying away their billions in plastic garbage bags while running down the street.
When people start talking about a shoot-to-kill policy for looters, aren’t they in danger of committing the crime of threatening the life of the President of the U.S.?
We might want to think about why it is the petty thief who gets shot while these other looters simply get richer (Hello Dick Cheney–I wanted a break from saying Halliburton).
Finally, to those who have said and continue to say that this isn’t about race or class, you simply aren’t paying attention. What is happening is, of course, about more than those social facts, but the existence of those social realities within a nation that allows itself to accommodate those realities will be rewarded with all the horrors brought on by the public’s inability to see what has been and continues to be made within the terms of that accommodation. We accept living within a world of unequal division of resources. We accept living in a state that is intent upon re-making the world to its accommodation. We accept the tearing down of a material fabric of governmental responsibility for which we pay with our taxes. And we accept this in some significant part because class inequality and racial inequality are as American as apple pie. The politics of death are articulated in the life we deny the most vulnerable of our people. And the life that is increasingly going to be denied to more and more of us.
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Wahneema Lubiano is Associate Professor of Literature and African and African American Studies at Duke University
