The Myth of Meritocracy

When I read about Michael Brown, the inept head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) who has completely botched the federal disaster management response to Hurricane Katrina, and that his prior experience was running something called the International Arabian Horse Association, and that his appointment was based on a personal connection, I cannot help thinking about how this scenario is played out over and over again in our society.

I teach a class entitled "Multiculturalism and Anti-Bias in Education" at Green River Community College. During our final class meeting of the summer quarter, we had a lively discussion about affirmative action. One of my students was firmly opposed to affirmative action, saying she felt that people of color who were less qualified were getting into colleges and getting jobs over more qualified white people. (Never mind that there was not one person of color in my entire class, except for me.) So I posed the question, "Isn't it a form of affirmative action when a white male whose father is an alumnus of an Ivy League school, automatically is accepted into the school, even if his grades are marginal? Isn't that a form of preferential treatment? Why aren't people clamoring to get rid of that?"


According to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Brown "admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center." Yet instead of taking him to task, Bush hailed him in Mobile, Alabama on Friday by saying, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." So not only does he get the job because of preferential treatment, when he screws up, he gets a pat on the back.

Peggy McIntosh of Wellesley College wrote an excellent article about white privilege entitled "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack", that many of us in the field of intercultural communications use in our work. Here is the link:

http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~mcisaac/emc598ge/Unpacking.html

It is because of white privilege that many whites and people of color view the political fallout of Hurricane Katrina through very different lenses. According to McIntosh,

"The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these subjects taboo."

Many whites will say that race was not an issue, whereas people of color will say that race was absolutely an issue.

White privilege is what got Michael Brown his job. If Michael Brown had been an African-American heading up the International Arabian Horse Association, with no prior experience with emergency management, he would never have had the connections, or been part of the good old boy network to get the job heading up FEMA. The appointment of Michael Brown goes to show that meritocracy is a myth. Society teaches us that if we work hard, we will get what we want, but white privilege puts certain people at an advantage while putting others at a disadvantage. As McIntosh writes,

"...obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already."

Wise Words from Leonard Pitts, Jr.

Two nights ago, my husband shared something with me that had happened earlier that morning. A business acquaintance of his was talking about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and started spouting hateful invectives--"Those n____rs deserved it! They were looting and out of control!" On and on and on. Because I'd met this person before and had detected racist attitudes in him, I was not completely surprised, although both my husband and I wondered out loud how the seeds of such venom and hate had been planted in this man's mind.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., my favorite editorial columnist from the Miami Herald, wrote a great column today entitled "Don't Use Katrina to Justify Your Hate" that addresses this issue. In it he writes, "It's as tiresome as it is predictable. American disunion being what it is these days, some of us look at even a natural disaster through the distorting prism of bigotry, rancor and fear."

I'd like to share the article with you because I think he has some important things to say:

Don't use Katrina to justify your hate
Leonard Pitts, Jr.

Does it really matter?

The city is flooded, people are homeless and hungry and scared and dead. Shouldn't this be a time for giving money and saying prayers? Should we really care about the color of the people looting in the hurricane zone? Or that Louisiana is a red state? Or that some of the dead are gay?

Apparently, that kind of thing matters to some of us.

It matters, for instance, to a black man who posted a note in an online forum saying he is embarrassed by news footage showing that most of the looters are black.

It matters to the white people who've sent me notes daring me to explain why blacks are "running amok."

It matters to the author of a note circulating on the Internet who says it would be a "problem" for a liberal in a blue state to send relief money to a red state.

And it matters to a group called Repent America, which has issued a statement saying the storm was God's way of canceling a gay festival that was to have taken place in New Orleans this week.

It's as tiresome as it is predictable. American disunion being what it is these days, some of us look at even a natural disaster through the distorting prism of bigotry, rancor and fear.

Let me say a few things here. The first is that the city of New Orleans is, according to the last census, 67.3 percent black. Given that looting is predictable under any significant breakdown of social order, whom would you expect to find out there smashing windows when the lights go out? Ethnic Hawaiians?

Besides which, white folks loot, too. Only it's not called looting when they do it. I refer you to a widely circulated news photo of a white couple wading through chest-high water after, in the words of the caption, "finding" food. As if that loaf of bread the woman has were just lying by the side of the road.

I'm sorry, but I have little patience for black people who find shame in this looting. Less patience for white ones who find vindication of their bigotry. It makes me angry that some people think these are the conversations we should be having now.

Our countrymen are in dire straits. We are talking in large part about those who had no means of escape, no cars or credit cards, no way to book a flight, reserve a room, buy a bus ticket, hop a train, no choice but to sit there and wait for disaster to come.

They are, by and large, the poorest and most meager among us and they are living through hell right now. Death toll rising like floodwaters, probably heading into the thousands, corpses floating down the street, and some liberal twit is joking — God, I hope he was joking — that the blue states should let the red one suffer? People clinging to roof tops, a great city turned into a steaming, stinking primordial swamp, and some alleged Christians think it's a victory for heterosexuality?

Memo to all these nitwits: It was a hurricane, not God's stamp of approval for your small-mindedness and hate.

Tragedy often becomes a stage for the best of human character. But it seems as if this tragedy is also destined to be a stage for the worst, a spotlight on the divisions that have lately grown so much wider between us.

And then there is the TV reporter who met a distraught man in the aftermath of the storm. He told her how his house had broken in two. How he tried to hold onto his wife as the storm and the water raged. How she told him, "You can't hold me" and asked him to take care of the kids and the grandkids. How he lost his grip and she was swept away.

The man was crying as he told the story and it seemed as if the reporter was weeping, too. For the record, he was black and she was white and I wouldn't be surprised if there were also other differences between them. But in that moment, they were just two human beings met at an intersection of inconsolable loss.

There are times when nothing else matters.

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr.'s column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: lpitts@herald.com

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.