The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer (22 page)

Most of the very extreme stories were fictions or gross exaggerations. The
New York Times
acknowledged this in an article one month after the storm headlined “Fear Exceeded Crime's Reality in New Orleans.”
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Stories of murders and the rape of children were found to be unverifiable. Eventually, after autopsies were carried out and despite all the claims that bodies were piling up in the Superdome, only six died there—four from natural causes (though no doubt exacerbated by the awful conditions inside), one drug overdose, and one apparent suicide.
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There is absolutely no doubt that serious crime occurred in the flooded city of New Orleans and that it included opportunistic rape. People appropriated food and other provisions but also took advantage of the lack of law enforcement to steal items that were hardly necessities. The image that was published with the
New York Times
article shows an officer inspecting stolen auto parts in the living room of a house used by looters. Looting was real enough. The question is why the reaction was so extreme. Not all the soldiers were in New Orleans to regain control of the city, but many were. How could those in high office conceivably have thought that such a large military presence would be required to get things under control in the city known in better times as the Big Easy?

What happened in New Orleans is best described as “elite panic.” The term is usually attributed to Caron Chess and Lee Clarke of Rutgers University, who presented the idea in the journal
Social Forces
in December 2008,
although there are antecedents of the idea.
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Kathleen Tierney, whose work was mentioned earlier, has discussed elite panic in several papers that Chess and Clarke cite. Rebecca Solnit brought the issue to public attention in her popular book
A Paradise Built in Hell
and in interviews.
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In Chess and Clarke's paper, titled “Elites and Panic: More to Fear than Fear Itself,” the notion is simple enough. It is, in fact, the
reverse
of the panic myth that says that regular people panic while a few trusted and well-trained people keep their heads and ensure that order is maintained.

The elite hold power by social, political, economic, and legal force. When their power is threatened, they overreact in what Chess and Clarke see as three distinct modes: elites may fear panic by ordinary people (they panic because they think ordinary people will panic); they may cause panic (by exaggerating what is happening); and they may themselves panic. The three modes are interactive,
and all three probably operate simultaneously in many instances. All three operated in New Orleans.

Media coverage of criminal behavior in New Orleans has the hallmarks of pure panic. It no doubt caused panic as well. The brutal suppression of massive riots in Myanmar in 1988 is also an example of elite panic. Sending 70,000 troops to New Orleans is another. Shooting 15-year-old Fabienne in Port-au-Prince for stealing a few cheap pictures is another. Different as these instances are, different as the instruments that the elite had on hand, they are all expressions of the same panic reaction.

In New Orleans, the elite panic was fueled by an intense racialization of the postdisaster narrative. There is no better or more passionate scholar of race in the contrived Katrina narrative than Michael Eric Dyson, whose book
Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster
came out in 2006, barely a year after the hurricane.
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The great majority of his writing and deep scholarly analysis has proven to be agonizingly accurate and shamefully so.

The people who were portrayed as making up the mobs of marauding murderers and rapists (baby rapers, no less) were predominantly young black men, the group most feared in the United States by white people of all social ranks. The very language used to describe what was happening has a racial bias. A widely circulated comparison of reporting on people obtaining food shows a young black man wading through chest-deep water with goods that he has “looted” from a grocery store; an essentially identical image of a white couple, just as deep in the floodwater with groceries, has a caption that says they are wading through the water after “finding” bread and water at a grocery store.
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The implication is obvious—black people are thieves; white people are just trying to survive.

Every negative stereotype of urban blacks was on parade. Stories of vile crimes in the Superdome were readily believed, largely because
the supposed perpetrators were almost always black. Almost every face in and around the Superdome and the convention center was black. The faces of those “in charge” of restoring order—Bush, Chertoff, Brown—were all white. Most white people falsely conflated the stories of civil unrest in New Orleans with the unrest in South Central Los Angeles following the Rodney King verdict in 1992. That verdict exonerated several members of the Los Angeles police department who were caught on amateur video severely beating King, who had been pulled over for a traffic violation.

In some ways New Orleans may have seemed visually similar to Los Angeles in 1992, and news commentary made allusions to that fact. The setting was also in a social sense quite similar. While the immediate trigger for the LA riots was the King verdict, the underlying cause of the riots was found by a Special Committee of the California Legislature to be the product of inner-city poverty, discrimination, a poor education system, few job opportunities, and police abuses.
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You could make the same statement about the poor areas of New Orleans where the purported looters and rapists came from. No wonder so many people conflated them—a black underclass behaving badly. Just what you'd expect! The conflation, while perhaps not wholly intentional, was very effective in making the association.

Another similarity between Katrina and Rodney King riots was the use of federal troops. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush sent federal troops to Los Angeles to quell the riots. Doing so required that he invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807. As the name of the act clearly states, it gives the president the power to command federal troops (and to federalize the command of state national guards) to engage in civilian law enforcement if civil unrest has reached a point where local law enforcement can no longer manage the situation, typically prohibited by the Posse Comitatus Act, the act of 1878 that limits the power of the federal government to use the US military for
civilian law enforcement. The act has been called upon rarely and cautiously. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy had used it against the will of state governors to enforce civil rights laws in the South in the late 1950s and early 1960s. During the LA riots, the governor of California asked the president to send federal troops. Each use of the Insurrection Act has had a deeply racial context.

George W. Bush did not invoke the Insurrection Act in 2005, although he tried to put the Louisiana National Guard under federal authority. Governor Kathleen Blanco resisted that plan, however, and Bush relented largely for political expediency, not wishing to overrule the governor's authority. He did send federal troops to help with the humanitarian mission, as is sanctioned under the Stafford Act. But such apparent consideration of use of the Insurrection Act suggests to me that the Bush administration believed that the situation in New Orleans was akin to that in Los Angeles in 1992—an uprising of black outrage against a white elite and a situation that required military intervention to get things back to order.

South Central LA in 1992
was
out of control. A large number of poor black and Hispanic people vented their anger and frustration at store owners who, by and large, were not residents of their community. Many stores were ransacked. Over 1,000 buildings were set on fire. Fifty-three people were killed.
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News helicopters flew over the scenes, and commentators—largely white—described the unrest graphically, imploring people (white people) not to go near the areas where the riots were happening.

The aftermath of Katrina was never analogous to the Rodney King riots, but many people appear to have, consciously or unconsciously, perceived it as such. The King riots were the only incident in recent history that “looked” like the Katrina aftermath. Mostly these biases are deeply unconscious, built up from years of biased reporting by the media and other cultural influences that assign and reinforce
stereotypes and prejudices. They are not biases you can get rid of very easily. The only thing a right-minded person can do is be aware and fight against them.

Almost every image of a person said to be involved in antisocial behavior in the media coverage after Katrina was a black person. Often it was a photo of a young male or a group of males, just like in South Central LA. The thousands of troops on the ground gave the impression that martial law had been declared. In other words, civil law enforcement had been suspended, and the military was in charge. In fact, however, Governor Blanco did not declare martial law. She called the looters “hoodlums” and seemed to have declared martial law (which she is not empowered to do) after troops arrived in New Orleans by stating to a BBC reporter that “[troops] have M-16s and are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will.”
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Improper declarations of martial law are well known throughout history. For example, the army took control of Lisbon after the earthquake of 1755 and erected gallows at high points in the city to deter looters. Over 30 people were hanged without trial. Philip Fradkin's work on the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco describes panic among those in authority there and a scene of chaos with unclear lines of authority.
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Federal troops stationed in the area were ordered into the city, not at the request of the governor or the mayor of San Francisco but by their battalion commander, acting with the best of intentions to assist in the rescue mission that overwhelmed the city's police. The city's mayor, Eugene Schmitz, anticipating widespread looting, ordered looters to be shot on sight—by the military. In effect, Schmitz declared martial law, though he had no authority to do so. As Fradkin writes, “Schmitz set in motion one of the most infamous and illegal orders ever issued by a civil authority in this
country's history.” Almost 100 years later, Governor Blanco made a good imitation of Schmitz's order.

And, of course, poor people and ethnic minorities were singled out for summary execution in San Francisco while upper-class people who sifted through rubble for valuables other than their own (just like the poorest did) were dispersed but not shot at. No doubt there are many other instances where this sort of overreach by panicked authorities has occurred.

In fact, as time has passed and more has emerged about what really happened in New Orleans, it is likely that white vigilante groups and the New Orleans police (about a third of whom did not report for duty) themselves were responsible for some of the most callous violence. At the time, the police force was roughly 50 percent African American, in a city that was nearly 70 percent African American. The strongest and most thoroughly engaged voice on white vigilante actions is that of investigative reporter A. C. Thompson. His article in
The Nation
titled “Katrina's Hidden Race War” came from a year and a half of researching and interviewing numerous people who lived through Katrina's aftermath.
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What Thompson shows is that many white groups, especially those in a white enclave across the Mississippi in Algiers Point, who harbored deep prejudices toward black people, used the diminished law enforcement as an opportunity to harass and even kill black citizens for essentially no reason other than their race. Thompson thinks that white vigilante groups were responsible for as many as 11 killings of black people. The groups exploited the chaos, the lack of police officers, and irrational fear of looting and other forms of lawlessness that they attached to the black stereotype to unleash their long-standing contempt for the black community, and they expressed that contempt with deadly weapons.

No one would be foolish enough to say that race relations in the US South are free of tensions. In fact, the South is where race relations are probably at their worst, inherited from the history of slavery and civil war. It is the region where school desegregation had to be enacted forcibly against the will of most people in state government. It was the home ground of the Ku Klux Klan and a variety of other racist organizations. But could anyone have imagined what actually took place after Katrina?

The white vigilantes of Algiers Point engaged in acts of revenge and reprisal made possible by a law-absent postdisaster setting. Through their actions, they got even for deeply felt injustices. Many of the most bigoted whites in the US South do not believe black people merit social equality and do believe they achieved it illegitimately. Many of the people Thompson interviewed—as seen in YouTube videos—sounded bitter and vengeful yet at the same time thrilled that they had been given a chance to take out their built-up hostilities on black people. They saw blacks as the source of most of the troubles the South experiences—troubles such as the high crime rates and high poverty and unemployment that give the Southern states an overall low ranking in most comparisons.

Like so much else about disasters, history can provide precedent for this sort of revenge. In the aftermath of the Kanto earthquake of 1923 that all but obliterated Tokyo and Yokohama, local Japanese massacred Koreans and Japanese socialists by the hundreds, perhaps the thousands.
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A false rumor was started that Koreans had used the opportunity of the chaos to set fires, loot, poison wells, and place bombs. At the time, Koreans in Japan had been agitating for an independent state and were responsible for terrorist acts in Tokyo and Yokohama. Native Japanese had a great deal of ill feeling toward the Koreans, and the disaster proved an irresistible opportunity to punish them. Accounts of the massacre make clear that the attacks were
tantamount to ethnic cleansing. A Korean's crime was nothing more than to be Korean. They were beaten by mobs, stabbed to death with swords, and killed in horrifying numbers without any evidence that they had committed a crime of any sort. The police themselves abducted and killed leaders of socialist and anarchist groups. No one knows the true total killed, but it may have been as many as 10,000.
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