Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

The two things Americans find hardest to think and speak honestly about are race and poverty. This is from two reasons, one psychological and one political.

The psychological reason is that the two scourges make mockery of the classic American ideals: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, so of course we tend to shrink from thinking about them. Hard questions, uncomfortable questions.

The political reason is that damned movement (a scourge in itself) called political correctness, and its Siamese twin, hypocrisy. It becomes impossible to analytically discuss anything that isn’t pretty. Instead of analysis, we get cartoons, stereotypes, finger-pointing.

Here are half a dozen thoughtful people on what Katrina showed us about race and poverty in America, from Fayetteville online.

Katrina showed great divide in America

As the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, The Associated Press asked notable Americans who know the Gulf Coast well to share their thoughts on questions of race and poverty. Has the divide that the storm exposed narrowed at all in the past year? Is there reason to hope that it will narrow in the future?

CHEF LEAH CHASE, 83, known as the Queen of Creole cuisine. She and her husband, Dooky, of 60 years are restoring their hurricane-damaged restaurant, Dooky Chase’s, which was a gathering place during the civil rights movement.

People get mad at me because I don’t talk about race or racism. To me, poverty is the thing. If you don’t have money, you’re going to have a hard time at everything, no matter what your skin color is.
I was in Birmingham (where she and her husband evacuated during Katrina), and I looked at those poor people wading through that flood water and it just broke my heart. They were there because they were poor. They didn’t have money, or a vehicle or a way to get out of town.
That situation in the Superdome was horrible, heartbreaking. The people there were poor. And sometimes people will hit me with, “They’re poor because they’re black,” and I can’t always go along with that.
… Get yourself a job, or if you get a welfare check, don’t spend it all on groceries. Find a way to put some of it away, save it up and get yourself a vehicle. Find a way to raise yourself up.
… That talk about a “Chocolate City,” that was so silly. If it’s a chocolate city, where is the green going to come from? Because most of us don’t have a lot of that. The color this city really needs to think about is green.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, a New Orleans resident and professor of history at Tulane University, is the author of more than 15 books, most recently, ‘The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.’

When writing “The Great Deluge,” I was uplifted by hearing how many white Americans recognized that racial bias existed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and wanted to openly address the dilemma.
Sara Roberts, for example, an accountant from Lake Charles, La., had helped organize the Cajun Navy, a flotilla of recreational fishing boats aimed at saving lives in flooded-out New Orleans East. As a white woman, Roberts was proud that she was pulling African-Americans out of attics and off of balconies. She prided herself in not being a bigot. An event occurred, however, which forced her to think more introspectively on the issue of racism in America:
On one boat rescue …, Roberts saw two African-Americans coming out of a Rite Aid with big bags full of merchandise. She had seen looters on her TV back in Lake Charles and now they were in front of her very eyes. Her blood boiled. Creeps! Swine! Degenerates! People all around were dying, and they wanted things.
It made her stomach turn. She later confessed to being extremely “judgmental,” convinced that their bags were full of radios, CDs and cameras …
“Later that day, I saw those same black guys in a 15-story high-rise,” she recalled. “They had taken those supplies and were passing them out among these elderly people that had been left behind, people that were desperate for Gatorade, energy bars, medical supplies and things of that nature. It made me very ashamed.”
The hope of race relations in post-Katrina America depends on all of us confronting our inner demons. … We must stop always snapping in knee-jerk fashion that racism doesn’t exist. It does. And it takes courage to admit bias. … That is where the healing begins.

STEPHANIE MINGO, 44, lived in New Orleans’ St. Bernard housing project until Katrina; her family evacuated, floating children in a refrigerator with the door removed. Mingohas organized protests against tearing down public housing.

The mayor says he wants a chocolate city. You know what happens with chocolate when you leave it out too long? It melts. All of us are gonna end up melting and disappearing. We’re gonna wind up melting if the mayor don’t do nothing about it, and they haven’t done nothing.
They’re not doing nothing for us because we’re black and we’re poor. They just can’t get in their heads that the poorest people spend the most money. They spend the most money, and they’re the hardest working people.
The black politicians, they’re forgetting about their history books. …
Since Katrina, I think it’s gotten worse for poor people. I really do. Even with all those jobs they say they have available, some people say they still can’t find work. But the first thing I always tell people is, ‘Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Just get up and do what you need to do.’
Many days, I want to cry, but it’s like, ‘Stephanie, just get up and do what you gotta do.’

ANDREI CODRESCU, author of ‘New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writing from the City,’ is the MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University. He is a regular commentator on NPR.
Katrina tore away the thin veneer of the unstated agreement to not talk publicly about race. …

“Race” has become a code for poverty and crime that is used by conservative politicians to vote against social change. Black leaders have also soft-pedaled the issue of race because they were afraid of losing what social programs were left.
Katrina revealed that there are people in America much poorer than it is publicly acknowledged. …
The nation didn’t know just how segregated we are. Now, they know.
The nation didn’t know just how bad our segregated schools are. Now, they know.
Katrina also taught us that the government does not care much about the black and the poor unless they are embarrassed by the media in front of the whole world.
I was hoping that some social political awareness would come out of this, but the government has thrown oodles of money at our state and city officials, enough to corrupt them even if they were straight before. Instead of an organized effort to rebuild both houses and communities, we are going to have a frenzied free-for-all for the cash, like a Mardi Gras mob yelling for beads.
I’m not sure what the spirit of New Orleans is, but if it’s any indication from the past, it is one of dancing drunk while your pockets are being picked. That spirit thrives unbroken. Everything else will be there, for show, but it will be brand-new, like Vegas.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON is a historian and director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. He is general editor of ‘The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture’ and editor of six more volumes on Southern cultural history.

Americans who have visited the Gulf Coast for the cultural pleasures of the French Quarter, the excitement of Mississippi’s casinos or the relaxation of the beaches discovered last year the racial and economic disparities that marked these places. A year later, racial and economic divisions have in many ways grown worse, especially in New Orleans.
The entire context of race relations has shifted. The biggest factor is that 350,000 people who used to be New Orleans residents have not returned since Katrina, and 80 percent of those are black. …
The demographic context for discussing race and poverty in New Orleans includes a 25 percent larger Hispanic population now than before the storm, with itinerant workers doing much of the rebuilding because they are willing to accept low wages…
The work of faith-based groups seems to offer the best glimmer of hope that Americans have sought not only to aid in recovery but to address the divisions of race and poverty…

JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN, 91, a professor emeritus at Duke University, assisted Thurgood Marshall on the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education and, half a century later, chaired President Clinton’s Initiative on Race.

… The New Orleans tragedy speaks in a loud but eloquent voice that racial inequities in the United States persist. One need only to visit Uptown, in the neighborhood of Tulane University, and the Ninth Ward, a remarkable concentration of African-Americans, to conclude that in the pre-Katrina days, it was racial disparities as usual. There were low wages for blacks, as well as poor housing, a false romanticism surrounding Mardi Gras, and a lack of general support for education and social well being.
As far as race in America is concerned, Katrina was just another example of the failure of the people of the United States to come to terms with a centuries-old problem … and make a forthright effort to solve it. Thus, it ranks with the failure of our schools to serve the needs of blacks and whites alike. … It is a bed-mate with the disparities in housing, not only in New Orleans but across the nation. …
There are many lessons to be learned from Katrina. Perhaps the most important one is … an appreciation for the common threads that bind all mankind together.