Hurricane Katrina has revealed and exposed the racist and classist attitudes of the Bush administration. This also illustrates the trap many of us have fallen into. After the hard-won victories in the 1960’s, we thought the problems of race had been solved. But the problem is that while overt racism is unacceptable in our society, covert racism is alive and well in this country. And covert racism reared its ugly head in America last night. AlterNet discusses a lot of the racist assumptions of the Bush administration.
Van Jones writes that the Bush administration made massive cuts in levee funding for New Orleans and diverted it into tax cuts, funding for the War in Iraq, and payoffs for Halliburton:
The result: catastrophe. The flooding was not a result of heavy rains. It is a result of a weak levee — one that was in mid-repair when the storm hit. And that levee, which has held back floodwaters for time beyond memory, collapsed for one simple reason: Bush refused to fix it last summer, when local officials were begging him to do so. Instead, he diverted those funds to the war effort.
In other words, the dollars that could have saved New Orleans were used to wage war in Iraq, instead. What’s worse: funds that might have spared the poor in New Orleans (had the dollars been properly invested in levees and modern pumping stations), were instead passed out to the rich, willy-nilly — as tax breaks.
The fact is, Bush gambled with people’s lives in the name of providing more and more funding for the Iraq War. We cannot blame the Mayor of New Orleans for this, like the right-wingers claim. He actually foresaw this potential disaster and begged for more funding. However, he did not get it.
The failure of the levees not only illustrates the failure of the Bush administration, it illustrates the failure of Conservative ideology as a whole. Conservative ideology assumes that people should be responsible for their own welfare, that giving them too much results in dependence, and that government should be made as small as possible.
But the problem is that we have tried this approach before. The Great Depression illustrated graphically the massive failure of Conservative ideology; Herbert Hoover was guilty of a similar slowness in responding to the Great Depression. Now, the hurricane illustrates the failure of the Bush administration to respond to crises in a same way.
The FEMA evacuation plans, drawn up by a man with no emergency management experience, by the way, assumed that many people had things which they don’t have:
Poor people and black people didn’t “choose to stay behind.” They were left behind. All evacuation plans required the city’s residents to have working, private cars — plus gas money, nearby relatives or funds for a hotel stay. And if you didn’t have all those things, tough luck.
Had the responsible agencies valued the lives of the poor, they would have helped the destitute flee in the face of the hurricane — even those who couldn’t afford a car or a motel room. But when the face of suffering is black, somehow our high standards for effective action and compassion begin to sag.
Not only that, some residents could not get out because of the massive traffic congestion that occured.
Dave Zirin writes that the Superdome, where many of the New Orleans poor were located, was itself a massive display of closet racism at taxpayer expense:
In a case of brutal foreshadowing that would shame a B horror flick, the dome was constructed on an old cemetery for the poor. The burial grounds were dug up and discarded with a promise that the Superdome would the centerpiece of a New Orleans Central Business District that would benefit all. The results are certainly now in plain, ugly view. This past week, 25,000 people, walked through its doors, many for the first time. They entered a stadium where tickets go for $90 a pop, season passes cost $1,300 and luxury boxes can run for as much as $109,000.
The arena boasts of having a capacity that can comfortably seat 72,000 people, with 9,000 tons of air conditioning, and 88 massive restrooms. But for the 25,000 who can’t afford the oxygen, there has been no air conditioning and bathrooms without electricity, running water or working toilets. Feces and garbage now pack the upper decks. The traumatized people finally emerging tell of dead bodies on the 50-yard line. One man even committed suicide, throwing himself off the upper deck.
We should rethink the way we look at sports stadiums. We all like our sports teams. But the problem is that too often they do not deliver the economic development results that their developers promise. The presumption with sports stadiums is that they will provide a steady flow of traffic to nearby businesses. But that is not always the case. Sports stadiums should be designed in a way that benefits people of all classes so that people who make minimum wage jobs can feel that this is their team as well.
The point in bringing up the Superdome is that while we have moved away from overt racism, we have not properly considered the possibility that our policies could have a disproportionate negative impact on Blacks in this country. And this is true for everyone from the President to people in this community.
If we decide to live in the comfort zone of a white middle-class suburban neighborhood and try to avoid contact with people “not like me,” we miss out on chances to achieve racial equality by using our talents to benefit people of all races. If we do not speak up when someone makes a racist remark, we miss out on a chance to help someone recognize their actions were wrong and why. If we fail to take an interest in world events, we concede the ground to the right-wingers and Emperor Dobson, who is breathing threats against Bush for failing to carry out his directives.
If you are a business owner, do you wait for people to come to you to get hired, or do you actively develop relationships with African-American groups and let them know when you have job openings? If you are a school teacher, do you only have 1 day a year where you celebrate Black culture, or do you do it on an ongoing basis throughout the year?
Undoing the damage caused by the Bush administration starts with the person in the mirror. I am going to a school that is much more diverse than the one I went to before. I could write more about issues affecting other countries and cultures. I could visit a religious center of a religion that I am not familiar with. I plan to go to a Unitarian service to see what it is like at my new place.
I am sure that if New Orleans had been 90% White and had voted for Bush 5:1, and Bush were still up for reelection, Bush would have been a lot more motivated to act quickly to bring relief. In fact, last year, Jeb Bush did not attend the Republican National Convention so he could direct the relief efforts there. But the problem is that Bush, not facing any kind of reelection, was no longer motivated to step up and help until public outcry forced him to. And changing the tone of our government requires changing ourselves so we can amplify our moral voice.
