Essay 137

Here’s an excellent column by an excellent writer in Chicago…

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Blacks must monitor how hurricane victims are treated

September 4, 2005

BY MARY MITCHELL SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

My decision was made the moment I heard my colleague’s loud sobs on the phone. I had tossed and turned the entire night before, haunted by the images of desperate black people stranded in the New Orleans Superdome surrounded by sewage, garbage and dead bodies. First they were at the mercy of a natural disaster. Now they were at the mercy of an inept federal government that had so badly bungled their rescue that New Orleans’ Mayor C. Ray Nagin broke down and started cursing during a radio call-in show.

‘Who is available to go?’

Besides sending money and donating clothes or material goods, black people of conscience will have to go to the New Orleans and Mississippi region, not only to aid the victims, but to monitor how these victims are being treated. I wasn’t the only person who reached that conclusion.

“Who is available to go to Louisiana and Mississippi,” pleaded Monique Caradine in an e-mail. The host of “Mo Talks,” a cable talk show, and the former radio personality at WVON-1450, Caradine was both sad and outraged.

“It is sickening that [the survivors] are being portrayed as looters, outlaws and criminals. The National Guard is patrolling the streets with automatic weapons. These people are not looters. They are trying to survive,” she said.

Four days after Hurricane Katrina turned the bustling city of New Orleans into a modern-day Atlantis, thousands of black survivors were still at the mercy of the elements -- and now hunger, thirst, lack of sanitation and medical treatment and alleged armed thugs.

‘Margins of society’

Many who managed by some miracle to survive ended up dying in the sweltering, filthy aftermath because no one had bothered to come up with a workable plan to get them out.

I understood my friend’s breakdown. People of all nationalities were affected by the storm, but African Americans especially were in shock. Day after day, we are bombarded with images of immense suffering and excuses about why aid has been trickling into New Orleans.

And to add insult to injury, now these survivors -- and that’s what they are, survivors, not refugees as they are being called by so many media as though we are talking about people from a foreign country rather than Americans in a devastated U.S. city -- are now being portrayed as out-of-control, wild animals.

I thought about that Friday as I listened to two white patrons in a restaurant chat about how “those people are shooting at rescue helicopters.” “What sense does that make?” one guy asked the other. “They are shooting at the helicopters and saying you better get my family.”

It’s a frightening story and one that has been used to justify why rescue workers were unable to quickly deliver food. Yet, it’s the same story being told over and over again -- not a similar story, but the same story. I haven’t seen one photograph of gun-toting thugs, or armed gangs or anything to suggest that a great number of the New Orleans survivors are on a pillaging rampage, or, as also alleged, raping and trying to murder the people who are trying to help them.

“I just don’t know how widespread the violence is, or if there’s really any measurable violence at all,” Caradine said.

How were they left behind?

While “No Child Left Behind” has been a mantra for the Bush administration, Americans have watched as a national crisis ravages tens of thousands of people who were left behind to face a hurricane -- simply because most of them lacked the means to escape. How were all these black Americans left behind while so many white people were able to flee?

What is it about our society that separates human beings like wheat from chaff?

On Friday, the New York Times finally broached the obvious -- African Americans, usually on the “margins of society” in a city known as a worldwide tourist attraction, were now thrust in the “center of the tragedy,” its headline proclaimed.

“I think a lot of it has to do with race and class,” the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem told the paper. “The people affected were largely poor people. Poor, black people.”

I knew that I would go

In days to come, experts will explain how it came to be that poor people were clustered in the most vulnerable areas of the city while the more affluent and mostly white population lived on higher ground. And government officials will try to explain the unfathomable bottle-neck in aid that left thousands of survivors in third-world conditions -- without even water, nor food -- for four days.

But there’s just no explaining why authorities suspended rescue and evacuation efforts to focus instead on looting. Americans died while police were trying to stop people from taking items that eventually would sink in the mud or burn in the fires. There’s no explaining why material things left behind by those who escaped meant more to government officials than human lives.

By the time my colleague had hung up the phone, I knew that I would go to Louisiana and try to do something more than wonder what went so deadly wrong.

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