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Sep 16, 2004

Left Behind In Louisiana

Ivan


THE SPECIAL COMMENTARY HAS RETURNED!

Mike Davis' provocative thoughts on how Ivan reminds us of the continuing problem of institutional neglect of minorities comes courtesy of TomDispatch.com, which I also recommend.


Poor, Black, and Left Behind
— Mike Davis

The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Ivan looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond's version of the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less — mainly Black — were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath.

New Orleans had spent decades preparing for inevitable submersion by the storm surge of a class-five hurricane. Civil defense officials conceded they had ten thousand body bags on hand to deal with the worst-case scenario. But no one seemed to have bothered to devise a plan to evacuate the city's poorest or most infirm residents. The day before the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, New Orlean's daily, the Times-Picayune, ran an alarming story about the "large group…mostly concentrated in poorer neighborhoods" who wanted to evacuate but couldn't.

Only at the last moment, with winds churning Lake Pontchartrain, did Mayor Ray Nagin reluctantly open the Louisiana Superdome and a few schools to desperate residents. He was reportedly worried that lower-class refugees might damage or graffiti the Superdome.

In the event, Ivan the Terrible spared New Orleans, but official callousness toward poor Black folk endures.

Over the last generation, City Hall and its entourage of powerful developers have relentlessly attempted to push the poorest segment of the population — blamed for the city's high crime rates — across the Mississippi river. Historic Black public-housing projects have been razed to make room for upper-income townhouses and a Wal-Mart. In other housing projects, residents are routinely evicted for offenses as trivial as their children's curfew violations. The ultimate goal seems to be a tourist theme-park New Orleans — one big Garden District — with chronic poverty hidden away in bayous, trailer parks and prisons outside the city limits.

But New Orleans isn't the only the case-study in what Nixonians once called "the politics of benign neglect." In Los Angeles, county supervisors have just announced the closure of the trauma center at Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital near Watts. The hospital, located in the epicenter of LA's gang wars, is one of the nation's busiest centers for the treatment of gunshot wounds. The loss of its ER, according to paramedics, could "add as much as 30 minutes in transport time to other facilities."

The result, almost certainly, will be a spate of avoidable deaths. But then again the victims will be Black or Brown and poor.

On the fortieth anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the United States seems to have returned to degree zero of moral concern for the majority of descendants of slavery and segregation. Whether the Black poor live or die seems to merit only haughty disinterest and indifference. Indeed, in terms of the life-and-death issues that matter most to African-Americans — structural unemployment, race-based super-incarceration, police brutality, disappearing affirmative action programs, and failing schools — the present presidential election might as well be taking place in the 1920s.

But not all the blame can be assigned to the current occupant of the former slave-owners' mansion at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The mayor of New Orleans, for example, is a Black Democrat, and Los Angeles County is a famously Democratic bastion. No, the political invisibility of people of color is a strictly bipartisan endeavor. On the Democratic side, it is the culmination of the long crusade waged by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) to exorcise the specter of the 1980s Rainbow Coalition.

The DLC, of course, has long yearned to bring white guys and fat cats back to a Nixonized Democratic Party. Arguing that race had fatally divided Democrats, the DLC has tried to bleach the Party by marginalizing civil rights agendas and Black leadership. African-Americans, it is cynically assumed, will remain loyal to the Democrats regardless of the treasons committed against them. They are, in effect, hostages.

Thus the sordid spectacle — portrayed in Fahrenheit 9/11 — of white Democratic senators refusing to raise a single hand in support of the Black Congressional Caucus's courageous challenge to the stolen election of November 2000.

The Kerry campaign, meanwhile, steers a straight DLC course toward oblivion. No Democratic presidential candidate since Eugene McCarthy's run in 1968 has shown such patrician disdain for the Democrats' most loyal and fundamental social base. While Condoleezza Rice hovers, a tight-lipped and constant presence at Dubya's side, the highest ranking, self-proclaimed "African American" in the Kerry camp is Teresa Heinz ((born and raised in white-colonial privilege).

This crude joke has been compounded by Kerry's semi-suicidal reluctance to mobilize Black voters. As Rainbow Coalition veterans like Ron Waters have bitterly pointed out, Kerry has been absolutely churlish about financing voter registration drives in African-American communities. Ralph Nader — I fear — was cruelly accurate when he warned recently that "the Democrats do not win when they do not have Jesse Jackson and African Americans in the core of the campaign."

In truth, Kerry, the erstwhile war hero, is running away as hard as he can from the sound of the cannons, whether in Iraq or in America's equally ravaged inner cities. The urgent domestic issue, of course, is unspeakable socio-economic inequality, newly deepened by fiscal plunder and catastrophic plant closures. But inequality still has a predominant color, or, rather, colors: black and brown.

Kerry's apathetic and uncharismatic attitude toward people of color will not be repaired by last-minute speeches or campaign staff appointments. Nor will it be compensated for by his super-ardent efforts to woo Reagan Democrats and white males with war stories from the ancient Mekong Delta.

A party that in every real and figurative sense refuses to shelter the poor in a hurricane is unlikely to mobilize the moral passion necessary to overthrow George Bush, the most hated man on earth.

Sep 16, 2004 |

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» Constructing Context from Pandagon
My friend Josh Bearman has posted a new essay by LA's most relevant intellectual, Mike Davis. Now, I rarely feel tentative about criticizing anyone on this site, so long as I know my critique is fair. But Davis is one... [Read More]

Tracked on Sep 17, 2004 at 10:52 AM

» Mike Davis on King/Drew from L.A. Observed
Questioning the facts and reasoning behind the lefty rhetoric of UC Irvine historian Mike Davis (author of City of Quartz and The Ecology of Fear is a recurring Los Angeles pastime. The latest inning begins with an essay Davis sent... [Read More]

Tracked on Sep 17, 2004 at 01:36 PM

» NOLA: Reading around from Mass Global Action Blogsphere
From Paul RobertsWalter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune (June 8, 2004): "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, [Read More]

Tracked on Sep 02, 2005 at 07:55 PM

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Posted by: wslmwps | Sep 23, 2007 at 07:37 PM

Hi Charles,

The photo isn't meant to show Lousiana, or New Orleans. It's just meant to connote "Hurricane" and gnarly waves overcoming the land. On this site, I put up pictures that evocative of the observations or ideas or topic of the post, not necessarily a news photo.

If you locate a more accurate photo, though, send it along, and I'll gladly put it up.

Josh

Posted by: Joshuah Bearman | Sep 26, 2004 at 01:10 PM

The image you posted is of the I-10 bridge connecting Alabama with Florida. It is not in Louisiana. Couldn't you at least use an image of New Orleans, even an old one? Maybe one of Betsy hitting the city? The use of this image is misleading and incorrect.

Posted by: Charles M | Sep 24, 2004 at 06:15 AM

CONNECTING THE DOTS

Like many black Angelenos, one section of my family hails originally from New Orleans. And, like many others, I’ve seen the inside of “killer King.” So I read with interest Mike Davis’s recent oferta, “After the Hurricane” which, if I can quote an old Hungarian, seems to me an important reminder that “nature is a societal category.” Understanding a hurricane is about understanding people and society. Otherwise, the pictures of the panhandle would look no different than the pictures from Grenada.

While the situation in Los Angeles is more complex--as yet, no one amongst the county supervisors has managed to suggest a medical equivalent of Louisiana's mayor Ray Nagin's suggestion that poor residents consider 'vertical evacuation' if they don't have cars--the crass lack of adequate hurricane planning and the nature of the discussion over King/Drew share important similarities. Pre-eminent among these, of course, are the fact that black democrats figure prominently in both cases. Put succinctly, both New Orleans and Los Angeles have local political leadership (and here we might consider making mayor Hahn an honorary member of the black bourgeoisie) whose essential role consists of arguing furiously in public that they are defending their poor constituents whilst overseeing the rapid (and comprehensive) dismantling of what passes in this country for a welfare state. Indeed, what links New Orleans and Los Angeles, besides for the mass migration a generation ago, is the striking confluence of race and class. Don't get me wrong. Things are better than they were when I was a kid, in that with the United States in an actual war, there are fewer army surgeons learning how to patch up G.I.s by practicing on black and Latino gunshot victims. But the basic point is the same: two local governments run by democrats that care little for the health and welfare of their poorest, darkest residents.

And it isn’t Bush’s fault, expect obliquely. While many Democrats remain loath to concede the point, the fact is that for more than a decade, the political calculus of the Democratic party has shifted away from campaigns based on new voters, economic redistribution, and a leadership role for nonwhites and toward an increasingly desperate search to recapture the putative “Reagan Democrat,” a creature seemingly as rare as an NBA player capable of making an open jump shot. The decision by the Democratic Party’s current central committee, the DLC, to make fiscal discipline a centerpiece of their efforts to position themselves as more “responsible” than the republicans means, among other things, cuts aimed at one of two groups. Local structural adjustment forces either workfare, closed health centers, and imploding schools for working class black folks or a series of cutbacks and hiring freezes that threaten the economic foundations of the black middle class. These choices, while obviously not mutually exclusive, do tend to exacerbate the economic bifurcation underway throughout African American communities nationwide.

The implications of this point are not always easy to understand or to accept. Most Democrats—including many black democrats—rightly excoriate the tokenistic behavior oft he Republican Party. Fewer, however, are able to really come to grips with what it means when a third of black voters in the former confederacy face permanent disenfranchisement, when the prison population explodes despite (or because of?) democratic governors and legislative majorities, or when the truest test of the marginality of the Secretary of State is that he finds himself talking about Africa. Let us summarize: we live in a country that does not care about black people, except when they constitute a threat or seem particularly athletic or in tune. This carelessness extends across the length of the political spectrum, and includes those black mayors, congressmen, and county supervisors whose jobs are dependent on those selfsame poor folks.

Whether in Louisiana, Los Angeles, or Iraq, the absence of planning constitutes an absence of interest. Shoddy medical care and inadequate numbers of bulletproof vests are evidence of a common disinterest in the welfare of the poorest citizens (and immigrant residents) of the United States. Perhaps Davis’s attempt to connect the dots constitutes an unfair attempt to impose “his” framework—the notion that society is divided between rich and poor?—onto a society divided between rich and poor. Perhaps. But the basic points, that “natural disasters” are anything but, that hospital conditions reflect conscious political choices, and that the circumstances we find ourselves in are also the responsibility of Democrats, are unassailable. Kerry is their standard bearer, and to him devolves the ultimate responsibility.

So, while we can hear the asses braying, “but Bush is so much worse,” we might also recall Stokely Carmichael’s observation. “You can’t eat Ralph Bunche for lunch,” he noted. I’m not sure Barak Obama would taste any better.

Posted by: Danny Widener | Sep 20, 2004 at 01:41 PM

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