White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (41 page)

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Authors: Tim Wise

Tags: #History, #Politics, #Sociology, #Memoir, #Race

BOOK: White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son
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OVER THE NEXT
few days, the narratives that began to develop from the Katrina tragedy showed how little most people understood either the city of New Orleans itself, its people, the political system under which we live, or the history of race and class subordination in America.
On the one hand, right-wing commentators holding forth on the nation’s airwaves took the opportunity to bash the people of New Orleans for their “dependence on government.” To the Rush Limbaughs of the world, the welfare state had sapped the individual initiative of the people there, and that was why they had remained behind, waiting on the government to save them. After all, he and others argued, they were living off the public dole anyway.
Having lived in the city for ten years and having worked with some of the poorest people there, I knew how incredibly and criminally inaccurate this meme was, but also realized that there would be very little chance of countering it, so ingrained were the race and class biases of the larger white public. Facts don’t matter to the punditocracy or to those who hang on their every word like pliant sheep.
So for instance, no one mentioned that prior to Katrina, there were only forty-six hundred households in the entire city receiving cash welfare payments: this, out of one hundred and thirty thousand black households alone, which means that even if every welfare recipient in New Orleans had been black (and they weren’t), still, less than four percent of such households would have qualified for the derision of the right. And of those few receiving such benefits, the average annual amount received was a mere twenty-eight hundred dollars
per household
, hardly enough to have managed to make anyone lazy.
In the Lower Ninth Ward, one of the hardest hit communities, and a place about which so much was said (and so much of it inaccurate), only 8 percent of the income received by persons living there came from government assistance, while 71 percent of it came from paid employment. In other words, folks in New Orleans were by and large poor in spite of their work ethic. Forty percent of employed folks in the Lower Ninth worked full-time and had average commutes to and from work of forty-five minutes a day. But the media didn’t tell us that. I had to discover it by looking at the relevant Census Bureau data that investigative journalists were too busy or too uninterested to examine.
On the night of September 2, during the Concert for Hurricane Relief, broadcast across the nation, hip-hop artist, Kanye West, injected another narrative into the discussion, saying what had been on so many folks’ minds, but which few had been willing to verbalize. Kristy and I were lying in bed, watching the concert when suddenly West, standing next to a stunned Mike Meyers (he of Austin Powers and SNL fame), went off script, discussing the media representation of looting and the way in which it stoked racial stereotypes. It wasn’t what the cue cards in front of him said, but Meyers rolled with it, picking up at the end of West’s soliloquy with another plea for financial contributions. Once Meyers finished reading his card, West blurted out the line for which he became instantly infamous in the eyes of many, including the president: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
I have to admit that when we heard these words, both Kris and I roared. I, for one, laughed so hard I almost fell out of the bed. Although I knew the comment was simplistic—fact is, what was happening was less about any one individual’s biases and more about a systemic and institutional neglect, by both major parties, that had jeopardized the lives of mostly black and poor folks in New Orleans—it provided a moment of almost comic relief. It was so unexpected, and the look on Meyers’ face as he realized what had just happened was priceless. The comment would be edited out of later re-broadcasts, or even the first broadcast on the West Coast later that evening, but by then it was out there, for good or ill.
By the next week, other narratives would be launched, some of which were well-intended, but ultimately wrong. Filmmaker Spike Lee, for instance, who would go on to make a wonderfully poignant film about the tragedy, was quoted early on as saying that what had happened in New Orleans had been a “system failure of monumental proportions.” Though I had always been a fan of Lee’s films and most of his social commentary, I knew in this case that he had it wrong.
For the displacement of hundreds of thousands of poor, mostly black people in New Orleans to be considered a system failure would require that prior to the so-called failure, those individuals had been doing just fine by the system; it would suggest that the system had been working for them, and
not
failing, in the days, weeks, months, and years leading up to Katrina. But had that been the case? Of course not. In fact, it wasn’t even the first time such folks had been displaced.
Although most Americans remain unaware of it, mass displacement of people of color, especially when poor, has been common, and not because of flooding or other so-called natural disasters, but as with New Orleans in 2005, because of man-made decisions. For example, from the 1950s to the 1970s, urban renewal and the interstate highway program had devastated black and brown communities in the name of progress, with hundreds of thousands of homes, apartments, and businesses knocked to the ground. In New Orleans itself, the I-10 had sliced through the city’s largest black communities in the 1960s, the Tremé and the Seventh Ward.
The Tremé—the oldest free black community in the United States—is bordered on one side by Claiborne Avenue, above which the interstate would be constructed. The Claiborne corridor had been home to as many as two hundred black-owned businesses in its day, and included a wide median (known to locals as a “neutral ground”) lined with huge oak trees and plenty of space for recreation, community picnics, family gatherings, and cultural events. Once completed, the I-10 had destroyed what was, for all intent and purposes, a public park sixty-one hundred feet long and one hundred feet wide, along with hundreds of businesses and homes. In the Seventh Ward, home to the city’s old-line Creole community, residents saw the same kind of devastation, also from the construction of the I-10 along Claiborne, including the virtual elimination of what was once the nation’s most prosperous black business district.
No, there was nothing new about the current displacement, and it hadn’t been the result of system failure. The people being affected had never been the priority of government officials. The system had let them down so many times before, and so consistently, that, indeed, one could even say that what happened in late August and early September 2005 was perfectly normative. If a system was never set up for you to begin with, and it then proceeds to let you down, even injure you, that’s not failure; rather, it’s a system operating exactly as expected, which is to say, it was a system
success
, as perverse as the implications of such a truth might seem.
Lee’s comments about the system failing were only outdone for their historical lack of perspective by the remarks of columnist David Brooks, who opined in the
New York Times
that “the first rule of the social fabric—that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable—was trampled.” But what kind of fantasy world could allow one to believe something as pitifully quaint as that? For some, including poor black folks in New Orleans, every day had been a time of crisis, and they had never been protected from it. So whatever social fabric Brooks may have been referring to, it clearly had never meant much to millions of people whom he appeared only after Katrina to have discovered.
Brooks went on to say that because of the government’s “failure” in Katrina, “confidence in our civic institutions is plummeting.” But confidence can only plummet when one has confidence to begin with. And who among us was saddled with such an affliction of naiveté? Surely not the black folks of New Orleans, and surely not the poor anywhere. Only middle class and above white folks have had the luxury of believing in the system and being amazed when it doesn’t seem to work as they expected.
IT WOULDN’T TAKE
long for the revisionists to begin whitewashing (pun very much intended), the racial element of the Katrina story. First, you’d hear rumblings that the real issue in New Orleans hadn’t been race, but rather, class. Money, it was claimed, is what really determined whether or not you’d been likely to have suffered major property damage or displacement because of the flooding. And true enough, there was a definite economic element to the damage, with lower-lying and mostly working class communities bearing the brunt of the inundation. However, within a few months, research from Brown University would bear out that race was an even better predictor of property damage and displacement than economic status, with African Americans far more likely to suffer either, relative to whites.
In New Orleans, 75 percent of the people in damaged areas were black, compared to only 46 percent of the population in the undamaged areas. In Mid-City, 83 percent of the population was black, and 100 percent of the area sustained damage from the flood; in New Orleans East, 87 percent of the population was black and 99 percent of the community suffered damage; in the Lower Ninth Ward, 93 percent of the population was black, and 96 percent of the area was damaged. Likewise, in Tremé, Gentilly, and all of the communities with public housing, save one, significant damage tracked the blackness of the community.
Among white communities, only Lakeview sustained massive destruction: 90 percent of the area damaged, while being only 3 percent black. By comparison, the almost all-white Garden District sustained virtually no damage; the nearly two-thirds white Uptown area had damage in less than 30 percent of the community; most of the Audubon and University district remained untouched; the 80-plus percent white Marigny had damage in less than 20 percent of the area; and the almost entirely white French Quarter had virtually no damage at all. So much for class being the main issue, rather than race.
While in New Orleans for a conference in summer of 2006, I came across the second form of revisionism, spelled out in a letter to the editor of the
Times-Picayune
. Therein, the author put forth the newest meme going around the city, especially among conservatives; namely, that whites had actually been disproportionately victimized by Katrina and that blacks had been
underrepresented
among the fatalities, since, after all, blacks had been 68 percent of the city’s pre-storm population, but comprised only 59 percent of those who had died. Whites, on the other hand, were merely 28 percent of the population before Katrina, but comprised 37 percent of the deceased.
Intrigued by the claim—and fascinated by the implicit racial animosity behind it (since it seemed to suggest blacks hadn’t suffered
enough
)—I went in search of the statistics the author had used to make his argument. There appeared to be conflicting data, some from the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, and other data reproduced on right-wing websites that had come from the Knight-Ridder news service. While both sets seemed to suggest that blacks had died at rates lower than their share of the New Orleans population, while whites had died at higher rates, more recent data from the state showed no real imbalance in the aggregate, with blacks comprising 65 percent of the dead and whites 31 percent—roughly equal to pre-storm population percentages.
But upon closer examination, which of course the revisionists saw no reason to perform, the problems with the conservative argument about disproportionate white suffering became clear. Fact is, the dead were overwhelmingly elderly, with three-fourths of all fatalities concentrated in the over-sixty age group. It was a statistic that made sense. Older folks are more likely to be in bad health to begin with, less able or willing to evacuate in a crisis, and are more susceptible to a major health event (like a stroke or heart attack) during a trauma. And since whites were far more likely than blacks in New Orleans to be elderly (more than twice as likely, in fact), that white fatalities might be slightly disproportionate should have been no surprise. Once mortality data was adjusted for age, so that only persons in the same age cohorts were being compared, blacks died at a much higher rate than whites, in every age category.
But the ultimate revisionism actually began just a few months after the catastrophe, when whites decided it was the city’s black leadership that was racist, and especially Mayor Ray Nagin. The charge was leveled at Nagin for his off-the-cuff comment during an MLK day celebration that New Orleans should be and would be once again a “chocolate city,” when displaced blacks were able to return. To whites, the remark was tantamount to saying that they weren’t welcome, and to prove how racist the comment was, critics offered an analogy. What would we call it, they asked, if a white politician announced that their town should be a “vanilla” city, meaning that it was going to retain its white majority? Since we would most certainly call such a remark racist, consistency required that we call Nagin’s remark racist as well, they maintained.

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