Indeed, during the last four decades our government has, more often than not, articulated national policies that privilege the wealthy, divide the races, and dedicate our national wealth to the construction of the most deadly military arsenal ever known. This failure becomes even more portentous when we place it in the context of our failure as a nation to struggle against rising racial and ethnic hatred, extreme economic inequality, and growing militarism at home and abroad. The failure of our government to act decisively and lend timely and life-saving assistance to the victims of Katrina suggests incompetence and a disregard for the value of the lives of poor people and people of color. King his cry for justice remains essentially ignored, even while we shamelessly flaunt his memory every January with a National Holiday. In the almost four decades since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King challenged America to lead all of humanity in a crusade against three "corrosive evils" that threaten to destroy the human race: racism, poverty at home and abroad, and militarism.
In Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community (1967), Dr. This is not working well for "them" or for this country. "This is working very well for them," she declared. They waited as the level of insensitivity reached a new high with Barbara Bush, the President's mother, declaring that because they were lower income people, they "were better off" outside of New Orleans. They continued to wait while FEMA, downgraded on the Home Security flow chart, and the state of Louisiana haggled over who was in charge. They were waiting amidst wreckage and rising water amidst filth and toxic decay. Most of them anyway." For the rest of New Orleans, for those both poor and Black, what came next was the deadly wait. As one report put it "he white people got out.
#Hurricane katrina aftermath articles skin#
Katrina, then is also about socioeconomic status, about the relationship between skin color and the wealth in one's wallet. Not only are relief and response time associated with race, but Black Americans are also being stigmatized by the media who see Black faces seeking food as looters, but not White people in the same predicament.
In this context, the charge of racism- dare we utter the word- is not without merit. What we are now witnessing is a throwback to a reality we thought we had overcome. Ragged, wandering souls, searching for loved ones, looked eerily like the men and women of the Civil War South, "freed" to fend for themselves as the war was ending. Resource allocation to communities with large populations of African Americans has been slow and deathly negligent. Yet, as it was during the Great Mississippi Delta Flood of 1927, and the Great Depression of the 1930s when Blacks were the last to receive aid or to be placed on relief rolls, so it has been with Katrina. Clearly, the devastation reached far and wide, irrespective of color or status, and our hearts and prayers go out to all of this terrible storm's victims. Katrina has revealed a number of unpopular truths about our country- including its differential valuation of human worth, poverty, and race. As we mourn the mounting multitude of lost lives and the continuing, but needless suffering of countless victims, the situation cries out for perspective. Hurricane Katrina, like some vengeful god, has ripped the last shred of cloth from the emperor's flashy but flimsy wardrobe. The co-authors are listed below the article: An Op-ed Column by Indiana University Professors (first published in Herald Times of Bloomington, Indiana on Sunday, Septemp.A13).
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