Race-ing Katrina

Backwater blues have caused me to pack up my things and go/Backwater blues have caused me to pack up my things and go/'Cause my house fell down and I can't live there no more”—Bessie Smith, “Backwater Blues

To understand the carnage currently taking place in New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast region, one has to understand what life was for many folks who lived in the city of New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans was a city in which nearly 70% of its inhabitants were of African-descent. Of the city’s nearly 450,000 residents, over 23% live below the federal poverty level and nearly 40% of children under the age of 18 also live below the poverty line, to say nothing of those folks whose incomes are above the poverty level, but still exist in a tenuous economic state. Tourism was the city’s primary industry, much of it related to the activities of The French Quarter and seasonal events like Mardi Gras, the Sugar Bowl, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the occasional Super Bowl. The livelihoods of many of the city’s working class and working poor communities were inextricably tied to their roles as service workers in the tourism industry. In other words, for much of the year, some sections of New Orleans were little more than underdeveloped outpost—not of some so-called “third world” nation, but right in the United States. In its aftermath, Hurricane Katrina has and will still expose many shortcomings in human nature, the federal government and political leadership—those elected and anointed—but for this moment, she has powerfully exposed the reality of race, class and poverty in the United States. Many of those who have died and will still die will have done so simply because they were poor and/or they were black.

As many were enthralled by the human and natural dramas taking place in the Gulf Coast region, the news that there was an increase of the number of people living in poverty in this country went virtually unnoticed. The more discerning viewer of national media coverage of Katrina could have guessed as much without the aid of a national report. The reality is that some of New Orleans’ residents were already dying a slow death, brought on by a concentration of poverty, inferior housing, dilapidated educational structures, violence, environmental decay and systematic state neglect. Ironically we can thank the national media, who quite unintentionally, exposed the world to the reality of poverty in the region, even as it took many outlets 3 or 4 days to wrap their head around the fact that the majority of city’s residents were black. While the national media might have been oblivious or at least unwilling to openly address the racial component of the disaster—including the absolute failure to contextualize the slow pace of federal assistance with the reality of who they were charged to assist and the subsequent “looting” that occurred—let’s not believe that the powers to be were not. New Orleans, like far too many of America’s urban centers, needed a Marshall Plan (like the one going down in Iraq), long before Katrina came ashore. The failure of the federal government to fully address the city’s near state of crisis before Katrina—including the failure to deal with an aging and inadequate levee system—had a great deal to do with the kinds of people who lived there.

The title of Thomas Shapiro’s recent book The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality is perhaps a fitting metaphor for what it meant to be black and poor in a city like New Orleans. Although Shapiro’s concern was over the wealth gap that exist between middle class blacks and whites and the extra costs associated with being black and middle class—higher mortgage rates, less equity, and less financial flexibility, among others—there are clearly also added costs associated with being black and poor. For so many poor people in this country, there is an understanding that poverty has added costs—not only are you poor, but you are forced to live in environments that often lack vital resources or at least the kinds of resources that those with significantly healthier economic profiles have come to take for granted. And the black poor have long understood this—this is exactly what Bessie Smith sang about in “Backwater Blues” (1927), her mediation on what it meant to be black and poor and forced to live in a place where whenever the waters of the Mississippi rose, there was a good chance you would lose all your earthly possessions. In the context of Hurricane Katrina, that added cost may have been your life or at the very least the scorn of a nation that couldn’t quite understand why you were “so black” and “so poor”. Thousands of American citizens became “refugees” in the eyes of the American public and while we understand that a refugee is one who seeks “refuge”, let’s also be clear that for most Americans that term has been largely applied to “boat people” fleeing the tyranny of their native lands. And in that regard maybe “refugee” is the fitting term.

Kanye West—brave as he is in his attempt the fill the leadership void amongst hip-hop artists since the murder of Tupac Shakur—was right when he said “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black people”, but we need to complicate that sentiment. It is perhaps too easy to suggest that the federal government’s response to Katrina would have been more emphatic if it occurred in largely white communities. The initially tepid and lazy response to Katrina in New Orleans wasn’t just a product of racist neglect, it was also the product of the devaluation of whole communities because they didn’t posses political capital. In other words the black poor of New Orleans were politically irrelevant thus it didn’t matter what happened to them because they were incapable of holding anybody accountable for their tenuous state. Yes, President Bush would have responded more quickly in Florida, but not simply because his brother is the governor of the state, or that the state is more visibly “non-black”, but because the Florida possesses a white and Spanish-speaking electorate that votes and thus can hold any damn body accountable for their failure to respond in a timely matter. On some level the sudden (and legitimate) indignation of black political leadership—The Congressional Black Caucus, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., Rev. Al Sharpton, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, etc—was insulting. There has long been cause for such indignation: the erosion of Civil Rights legislation, the prison industrial complex, the dysfunctionality of the electoral process, the tragedy of urban schooling, homophobic and misogynist violence, and the criminal justice system among them. As the images of the black poor in New Orleans began to circulate, it not only exposed social crevices caused by race and class, but perhaps, the irrelevancy of current black political leadership. The indignation of black political leadership was as much a last stab at validation as it was a legitimate attempt to find recourse for those suffering in New Orleans and other regions of the Gulf Coast.

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Literally as the heritage of New Orleans washes away in defiled and diseased waters, there’s little doubt that there was a new blues that was birthed on rooftops, in the Superdome and outside the New Orleans Convention Center. The stories of those children and young people who were forced to suffer have yet to be told and they will be told in the music, visual art, literature and body movements that have yet to come—except in the nightmares these folk have confronted them nearly every night since Katrina’s land-fall became a reality. Katrina was an incredible disaster, but let’s hope that her most lasting effect will be to rattle the foundations of a democracy that has failed to live up to its own promises.


NP: Wynton Marsalis--In This House, On This Morning