A National Disgrace

As I watch the heartbreaking images of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I am extremely disturbed at what I see. If people want a rude awakening about the state of the racial divide in our country, just turn on the television. There are those who will say that there is not a racial issue anymore in this country, and it's all about class. However, one cannot deny the fact that race and class are inextricably intertwined. Look at the people in New Orleans, stuck in the Convention Center without food and water. 99% of them are poor and African-American. These are the people who have no way to get out of the city, no car and no money. As I watched the Dateline Special last night, the racial divide was glaring. White people with cars were fleeing New Orleans, sitting in long gas lines, trying to find a motel. Other white people holed up on a rooftop of a vacant apartment building, afraid of the violence on the streets. And tens of thousands of African-American people (with a smattering of a few white faces) in the New Orleans Convention Center, with no food, no water, surrounded by the dead and the dying, forgotten by the powers that be. Is this really America? Sadly, yes.

Martin Espada, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts says, "We tend to think of natural disasters as somehow even-handed, as somehow random. Yet it has always been thus: poor people are in danger. That is what it means to be poor. It's dangerous to be poor. It's dangerous to be black. It's dangerous to be Latino."

And Charles Steele Jr., the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta had this to say: "Everything is God's will. But there's a certain amount of common sense that God gives to individuals to prepare for certain things. Most of the people that live in the neighborhoods that were most vulnerable are black and poor. So it comes down to a lack of sensitivity on the part of people in Washington that you need to help poor folks. It's as simple as that."

Patti Digh, a colleague of mine at Executive Diversity Services, wrote a moving piece about just this issue on her weblog, 37 Days. In it she talks about the intersection of race and class, how white privilege and socioeconomic privilege make people oblivious to the fault lines that divide people, and how Hurricane Katrina is bringing it all to the forefront. Here's the piece:

http://37days.typepad.com/37days/2005/09/replace_they_wi.html

As Patti writes in her piece, if the people in the Convention Center were wealthy and influential, would they be sitting there for five days dying in the sun, waiting for food and water? Of course not. But the people there now are those in the margins. They are not looked at as individuals, but as a mob. Without resources and without connections. Forgotten. The response to the tsunami victims in Asia was quicker than the response to our own citizens. It's unconscionable and an unspeakable tragedy.