WhitePrivilege.com

It is not often in this country, even on public radio, that we hear frank and lucid talk about the structural forces that created and continue to maintain black ghettos in the United States. Sometimes, we seem too steeped in individualist rhetoric and moralistic judgements to talk about and begin to address the intentional and unintentional policy choices in this country that have created.

On PRI’s “Speaking of Faith” today, there was a one hour program with Dr. David Hilfiker, a affluent white doctor who has been living in and practicing medicine in inner-city Washington DC for two decades now. He talks about the structural forces that perpetuate racial segregation in this country, white privilege, and the deep religious conviction that injustices harm us collectively and spiritually.

Also, some very well-written and engaging listener reactions to the program.

a prayer band

every thing

you ever paid for
you ever worked on
you ever received

every thing

you ever gave away
you ever held on to
you ever forgot about

every single thing is one
of every single thing and all
things are gone

every thing i can think to do
to say i feel
is buoyant

every thing is below water
every thing is eroding
every thing is hungry

there is no thing to eat
there is water every where
and there is no thing clean to drink

the children aren’t talking

the nurses have stopped believing
anyone is coming for us

the parish fire chief will never again tell anyone that help is coming

now is the time of rags
now is the indigo of loss
now is the need for cavalry

new orleans
i fell in love with your fine ass poor boys sweating frying catfish blackened life thick women glossy seasoning bourbon indians beads grit history of races
and losers who still won

new orleans
i dreamt of living lush within your shuttered eyes
a closet of yellow dresses a breeze on my neck
writing poems for do right men and a daughter of refugees

i have known of displacement
and the tides pulling every thing
that could not be carried within
and some of that too

a jamaican man sings
those who can afford to run will run
what about those who can’t
they will have to stay

end of the month tropical depression turned storm

someone whose beloved has drowned
knows what water can do
what water will do to once animated things

a new orleans man pleads
we have to steal from each other to eat
another gun in hand says we will protect what we have
what belongs to us

i have known of fleeing desperate
with children on hips in arms on backs
of house keys strung on necks
of water weighed shoes
disintegrated official papers
leases certificates births deaths taxes

i have known of high ways which lead nowhere
of aches in teeth in heads in hands tied

i have known of women raped by strangers by neighbors
of a hunger in human

i have known of promises to return
to where you come from
but first any bus going any where

tonight the tigris and the mississippi moan
for each other as sisters
full of unnatural things
flooded with predators and prayers

all language bankrupt

how long before hope begins to eat itself?
how many flags must be waved?
when does a man let go of his wife’s hand in order to hold his child?

who says this is not the america they know?

what america do they know?

were the poor people so poor they could not be seen?

were the black people so many they could not be counted?

this is not a charge
this is a conviction

if death levels us all
then life plays favorites

and life it seems is constructed
of budgets contracts deployments of wards
and automobiles of superstition and tourism
and gasoline but mostly insurance

and insurance it seems is only bought
and only with what cannot be carried within
and some of that too

a city of slave bricked streets
a city of chapel rooms
a city of haints

a crescent city

where will the jazz funeral be held?

when will the children talk?

tonight it is the dead
and dying who are left
and those who would rather not
promise themselves they will return

they will be there
after everything is gone
and when the saints come
marching like spring
to save us all

What would it take to truly repair the lives of African Americans, other peoples of color, and poor people after Katrina? Could this be an opportunity to create a model for society as it could be? A racially just society? What about the native peoples who preceded Europeans along the gulf? Is now the time to consider how to address Native American genocide and sovereignty issues? With these questions I will begin to document ideas for racially just responses to Katrina:

(1) Glen Ford at Black Commentator claims the Right of Return, a term usually associated with the right of Palestinians to return to their former lands, for the people of New Orleans:

Displacement based on race is a form of genocide, as recognized under the Geneva Conventions. Destruction of a people’s culture, by official action or depraved inaction, is an offense against humanity, under international law. In fact, it is imperative that we demand the Right of Return now, before the circumstances of the displacement create facts on the ground that cannot be reversed. We have seen, elsewhere in the world, how those who have been displaced are effectively shut out from returning to their origins. Others, newcomers, will benefit from the tragedy of the previous population’s displacement. This cannot be allowed to occur in New Orleans. The federal government has an obligation to direct every resource to making it possible and practical for them to return, and to live productive lives in the city from which they were driven.

(2) Human rights frameworks can provide a useful standard of how people should be treated in the short and long terms. The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) can be useful in pressing governments to ensure that outcomes of policies do not create or maintain racial disparity or discrimination. This is a novel way of addressing racism in a legal system focused on intent. The US has signed and ratified ICERD.

(3) I was reading about supposed murders in New Orleans and the Superdome which got me wondering whether the various levels of government can be held liable for criminally negligent homicide in the thousands of deaths that can be verified.

More to come…

“I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” — President Bush, on “Good Morning America,” Sept. 1, 2005, six days after repeated warnings from experts about the scope of damage expected from Hurricane Katrina

“What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (chuckle) – this is working very well for them.” – Former First Lady Barbara Bush, on the Hurricane flood evacuees in the Houston Astrodome, Sept. 5, 2005

“It makes no sense to spend billions of dollars to rebuild a city that’s seven feet under sea level…It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.” – House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.)

“We’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do…The good news is — and it’s hard for some to see it now — that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house — he’s lost his entire house — there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.” (Laughter) —- President Bush, touring hurricane damage, Mobile, Ala., Sept. 2, 2005

“Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well.” – FEMA Director Michael Brown, Sept. 1, 2005

“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” – President Bush, to FEMA director Michael Brown, while touring Hurricane-ravaged Mississippi, Sept. 2, 2005

“I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don’t have food and water.” – Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Sept. 1, 2005

“Well, I think if you look at what actually happened, I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, ‘New Orleans Dodged the Bullet.’ Because if you recall, the storm moved to the east and then continued on and appeared to pass with considerable damage but nothing worse.” – Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, blaming media coverage for his failings, “Meet the Press,” Sept. 4, 2005

“I mean, you have people who don’t heed those warnings and then put people at risk as a result of not heeding those warnings. There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving.” – Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), Sept. 6, 2005

“You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals…many of these people, almost all of them that we see are so poor and they are so black, and this is going to raise lots of questions for people who are watching this story unfold.” – CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, on New Orleans’ hurricane evacuees, Sept. 1, 2005

“What didn’t go right?’” – President Bush, as quoted by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), after she urged him to fire FEMA Director Michael Brown “because of all that went wrong, of all that didn’t go right” in the Hurricane Katrina relief effort

“Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?” – House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-TX), to three young hurricane evacuees from New Orleans at the Astrodome in Houston

“We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” – Rep. Richard Baker (R-LA) to lobbyists, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal

“I also want to encourage anybody who was affected by Hurricane Corina to make sure their children are in school.” – First Lady Laura Bush, twice referring to a “Hurricane Corina” while speaking to children and parents in South Haven, Mississippi, Sept. 8, 2005

“It’s totally wiped out…It’s devastating, it’s got to be doubly devastating on the ground.” –- President Bush, turning to his aides while surveying Hurricane Katrina flood damage from Air Force One, Aug. 31, 2005

“I believe the town where I used to come – from Houston, Texas, to enjoy myself, occasionally too much –- will be that very same town, that it will be a better place to come to.” – President Bush, on the tarmac at the New Orleans airport, Sept. 2, 2005

“You know I talked to Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi yesterday because some people were saying, ‘Well, if you hadn’t sent your National Guard to Iraq, we here in Mississippi would be better off.’ He told me ‘I’ve been out in the field every single day, hour, for four days and no one, not one single mention of the word Iraq.’ Now where does that come from? Where does that story come from if the governor is not picking up one word about it? I don’t know. I can use my imagination.” –Former President George Bush, interview with CNN’s Larry King, Sept. 5, 2005

“We just learned of the convention center – we being the federal government – today.” – FEMA Director Michael Brown, to ABC’s Ted Koppel, Sept. 1, 2005, to which Koppel responded “Don’t you guys watch television? Don’t you guys listen to the radio? Our reporters have been reporting on it for more than just today.”

“I don’t want to alarm everybody that, you know, New Orleans is filling up like a bowl. That’s just not happening.” — Bill Lokey, FEMA’s New Orleans coordinator, in a press briefing from Baton Rouge, Aug. 30, 2005

“FEMA is not going to hesitate at all in this storm. We are not going to sit back and make this a bureaucratic process. We are going to move fast, we are going to move quick, and we are going to do whatever it takes to help disaster victims.” — FEMA Director Michael Brown, Aug. 28, 2005

“I don’t make judgments about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans.” –- FEMA Director Michael Brown, arguing that the victims bear some responsibility, CNN interview.

“I understand there are 10,000 people dead. It’s terrible. It’s tragic. But in a democracy of 300 million people, over years and years and years, these things happen.” — GOP strategist Jack Burkman, on MSNBC’s “Connected,” Sept. 7, 2005

“But I really didn’t hear that at all today. People came up to me all day long and said ‘God bless your son,’ people of different races and it was very, very moving and touching, and they felt like when he flew over that it made all the difference in their lives, so I just don’t hear that.” –- Former First Lady Barbara Bush to CNN’s Larry King, after King asked her how she felt when people said that her son “doesn’t care” about race, Sept. 5, 2005

“I’m going to go home and walk my dog and hug my wife, and maybe get a good Mexican meal and a stiff margarita and a full night’s sleep.” –- FEMA Director Michael Brown, on his plans after being relieved from his role managing Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, Sept. 9, 2005

“Bureaucracy is not going to stand in the way of getting the job done for the people.” – President Bush, Sept. 6, 2005

Mukoma Wa Ngugi writes an interesting piece examining possible reasons why “[t]he devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina is being compared to disasters in the “Third World”.”

He writes that:

The American citizen has been stewing in nationalism, manifest destiny and the myth of the democratic society that errors but never oppresses or marginalizes for so long that even a natural disaster cannot be seen and understood outside this lens. And the fact that most of the victims are predominantly poor and African American is not being understood as a creation of very specific domestic policies and conservative ideologies; it has to be filtered through the “Third World”. As if a disaster from that “part of the world” somehow managed to sneak through the porous Mexican borders.

Meanwhile, a new UN report on global inequality makes the claim that for many poor people of color in the United States, daily living conditions and access resources, especially health care, are worse than those in developing countries.

Paul Vallely, analyzing the report in the UK paper The Independent, writes that “yesterday’s UN report provides statistical proof that for many - well beyond those affected by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina - the great American Dream is an ongoing nightmare…the infant mortality rate in the US is the same as Malaysia, which has a quarter of America’s income…Blacks in Washington DC have a higher infant death rate than people in the Indian state of Kerala…Throughout the US black children are twice as likely [as white children] to die before their first birthday…Hispanic Americans are more than twice as likely as white Americans to have no health cover[age].”

Thulani Davis, in “Unbearable Crime on the Mississippi” at BlackCommentator.com, 9/8/05, draws on Jesse Jackson’s witness to the devastation as looking into the bottom of a slave ship. The importance of his metaphor–and other poetry that conveys the loss of one’s family along side the recognition that help is not coming–is for white people to feel generations of this pain, to feel the enormity of history, the depth of our responsibility. It is a call for us to feel far beyond pity into loss. Such poetry makes it possible for “black pain” to become intolerable to us. And attempting to live with such loss, responsibility, and pain becomes its own call to action, against the very forces that contributed to the wreckage and are hard at work reconsolidating power and ownership. Davis writes:

“I think that really goes to why all the rest of us watching are so traumatized. And I think it is necessary to repeat what Jesse Jackson has said about how the people in this country have a high tolerance for viewing “black pain.” Yes, while we are asking the unheard question as to why a third of New Orleans’ population is poor and all black, everyone from the president on down is comfortable with these realities of our ongoing unemployment, overcrowding, homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, neighborhood crime and despair.

We are witnessing in a matter of days a dislocation one-fifth the size of Middle Passage – which took place over more than 200 years. And all those conveniences of modern social organization which would mitigate its effects for most of us – phone, internet, cars, gasoline, and family with ample housing – do not apply to this country’s poor. For them, getting lost may mean not being found any more easily than in 1865 when people went on foot and in wagons following word of mouth leads to find where family members may have been sent.”

As reported today by Christopher Cooper in the Wall Street Journal, rich white people are as determined as ever to own, control, and rebuild New Orleans in their own image. While a numerical minority in a city ostensibly committed to democracy, rich white people are sitting relatively high and pretty dry these days in New Orleans. Their neighborhoods were spared the rising waters, for the most part, and their homes are powered by generators and protected by a small army of private security contractors. City water service has even been restored in some of these exclusive areas. And it’s far from clear whether law enforcement is enforcing the city-wide evacuation order in rich white neighborhoods.

African American residents of the city have been scattered to the four winds, as far away as Dallas and Washington, DC. In their absence rich white business owners are meeting with officials and setting policy agendas to determine what kind of city New Orleans is after the rebuilding begins and ends. Even with their eyes turned toward a future they insist on determining according to their interests, one cannot help but be mindful of history:

More than a few people in Uptown, the fashionable district surrounding St. Charles Ave., have ancestors who arrived here in the 1700s. High society is still dominated by these old-line families, represented today by prominent figures such as former New Orleans Board of Trade President Thomas Westfeldt; Richard Freeman, scion of the family that long owned the city’s Coca-Cola bottling plant; and William Boatner Reily, owner of a Louisiana coffee company. Their social pecking order is dictated by the mysterious hierarchy of “krewes,” groups with hereditary membership that participate in the annual carnival leading up to Mardi Gras. In recent years, the city’s most powerful business circles have expanded to include some newcomers and non-whites, such as Mayor Ray Nagin, the former Cox Communications executive elected in 2002.

As many as 40 New Orleans “business leaders” (which means, if the past is any guide to decoding the language of the Wall Street Journal, “rich white men”) plan to meet with Mayor Nagin in Dallas tomorrow to “begin mapping out a future for the city”. Does anyone really need to point out that that future will be one in which white privilege and supremacy is even more deeply entrenched and retrenched into the public fabric of the city?

The WSJ doesn’t leave that point to chance, making clear that

The power elite of New Orleans…insist the remade city won’t simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.

Again, to translate into plain language, “teeming underclass” is code for “poor black people and Hispanics”. In case that doesn’t make the point clear enough, Mr James Reiss, one of the city’s white elite, said that the New Orleans of the future must be one where there are “fewer poor people”. He adds, “‘Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically
and politically,’ he says. ‘I’m not just speaking for myself here. The way we’ve been living is not going to happen again, or we’re out.’” One thing Mr Reiss says is true enough: he isn’t just speaking for himself when he describes his ambitions to racially cleanse New Orleans. He also speaks for George Bush’s administration and policies, he speaks for the white power elite which still runs not only New Orleans, and Louisiana, but the whole New Old South, as well as much of the rest of US society.

No, Mr Reiss, never fear: we know precisely who you are speaking for. The question is who’s listening to you and why?

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.”

With a sickening callousness equal to that of the former French queen’s, note the mother of the president’s response to visiting the Astrodome excerpted from “Barbara Bush: Relocation is “‘Working Very Well For Them,’” DemocracyNow.org, 9/6/05 and “Barbara Bush Makes Hurricane Gaff“, TVNew Zealand, TVNZ.CO.NZ, 9/7/05

While the federal government has been widely criticized for its slow response, former First Lady Barbara Bush told the radio show Marketplace that the relocation is “working very well” for some of those forced out of New Orleans since they were “underprivileged anyway.”

“Almost everyone I’ve talked to says ‘we’re going to move to Houston,’” Bush said. “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality,” she said.

During a live, televised charity for Katrina victims, a bit of inconvenient truth somehow managed to escape — Kanye West, who’s rather a hip-hop genius, went way, way off the script, indicting the slowness of official response to the victims of Katrina, including the racist portrayal of African Americans in New Orleans (which was documented here a few days ago). In impromptu remarks, West tied the fate of poor, mostly black people in New Orleans to the war in Iraq — including the remarkably evil “shoot to kill” orders that have been given National Guardsmen and others in the area.

(And before you object that Katrina has nothing to do with Iraq, you should know that the Army Corps of Engineers is largely responsible for the levees which protect New Orleans from the Mississippi River. Funding for maintenance and expansion of those levees was cut, after 9/11, by FEMA and by the Bush Administration. All of that funding was redirected to the so-called War on Terror and to the Department of Homeland Security. And, lest you should object that hurricanes like Katrina are random, unforeseeable acts of nature, this hurricane was foreseen as one of the three worst possible disasters that were likely to befall the US. The other two were a major California earthquake and a terrorist attack on New York City.)

But then Kanye West got straight to the heart of things when he said: “George Bush does not care about black people.” No shit: it’s about time someone said that on national television.