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Jewish World Review Sept. 8, 2005 / 4 Elul, 5765 Race, Poverty And Katrina By Clarence Page
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
As a political commentator, Kanye West makes a great rap artist.
During an NBC TV fund-raiser for Hurricane Katrina victims, the hip-hop star departed from his prepared script to blurt out, among other nuggets, "George Bush doesn't care about black people."
I winced.
I'm hardly a member of President Bush's amen corner and I like West's music. I had just purchased West's new CD, "Late Registration," a day before his outburst. Time magazine's cover recently called him "Hip-Hop's Class Act" and I usually would not argue with that.
Nevertheless, in my humble, nonmusical opinion, West's anti-Bush remarks were not only inappropriate (one hopes that Bush voters' donations are just as welcome as everyone else's) but also shortsighted. The sluggish official response to Katrina left more than black folks in her wake. It also left plenty of officials besides President Bush who deserve to share the blame.
There's plenty of blame to spread around up and down the chains of command and across lines of race and political party, to the city's mayor, Ray Nagin, who happens to be black, and the Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, who, like the mayor, happens to be a Democrat.
The real question now is, what will we, as Americans, learn from the Katrina tragedy and do about it?
Will we see scenes again like the tearful testimony of Louisiana's Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday, almost a week after the storm. Officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency turned back three trailer trucks of water, he said, ordered the Coast Guard not to provide emergency diesel fuel and cut emergency power lines to his largely white, middle-class New Orleans suburb.
"They've had press conferences," he said, bursting into tears. "I'm sick of the press conferences. For G-d sakes, shut up and send us somebody!"
The sad, sad truth is that politicians as a rule do not like to invest in solutions to problems that may not occur until after they are out of office.
It's not that the politicians didn't care about black people but that they did not care ENOUGH about people in need, regardless of their race, especially the poor who, lacking the resources of the movers and shakers, get moved and shaken.
Questions of whether New Orleans storm victims would have gotten quicker help if more of them were white misses the larger point: Fewer would have been left behind in the city's evacuation plan had fewer of them been poor.
In New Orleans, where the population is 67.1 percent black and the poverty rate is about 25 percent, the faces of the moved and shaken, transmitted around the world by TV, turned out to be almost all black.
As a result, Katrina ironically put the perennial American issues of race and poverty back on the front page of America's attention, at least for a while.
After years on the nation's front burners, race and poverty received barely a mention in the 2000 or 2004 presidential campaigns. Both issues seem to have been pushed to the margins of national discussion by the late 1990s' economic boom, the big drop in urban crime and a rise in goodwill surrounding black cultural-crossover achievers as diverse as Oprah Winfrey, Colin Powell and Tiger Woods.
Katrina suddenly made America's invisible poor very visible again and, surprise, most of the televised faces were black. News media who previously had given too little attention to the black poor, in my view, almost gave them too much attention in New Orleans, which had more TV cameras per capita than any other place in the region.
By shortchanging attention to the region's many victimized whites, as well as blacks and others, as Katrina raked across the poorest region of the United States, according to Census figures, TV gave a distorted picture of poverty, homelessness and joblessness as black problems.
A further irony: The U.S. Census Bureau reported a few days after the storm that the national poverty rate climbed in 2004 for the fourth year in a row (to 12.7 percent from 12.5 percent in 2003). The increase was borne completely by non-Hispanic whites, the only ethnic group that saw its poverty rate rise.
Poverty, like hurricanes, is not a problem limited to blacks. Washington is known to be a place where everyone is responsible, but no one gets blamed. I hope, after all of the finger-pointing and blame-shifting about Katrina's devastation is done, that Washington will step up to provide the national leadership for true homeland security.
Leave no disaster victim behind.
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Comment on Clarence Page's column by clicking here. © 2005, TMS |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
