Two Americas

Sometimes a journalist's job is simply to state the obvious. That's why, for example, TV weather jockeys start their reports confirming that yes, your eyes didn't deceive you, it really was a very nice day outside.

That's sort of what the AP's Frank Bass does with this piece, "Poor suffered brunt of Katrina's wrath." Bass restates the obvious and backs it up with census data and on-the-scene detail, thus helping to make the obvious official:

People living in the path of Hurricane Katrina's worst devastation were twice as likely as most Americans to be poor and without a car -- factors that may help explain why so many failed to evacuate as the storm approached.

An Associated Press analysis of Census data shows that the residents in the three dozen hardest-hit neighborhoods in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama also were disproportionately minority and had incomes $10,000 below the national average.

"Let them know we're not bums. We have houses. Our houses were destroyed. We have jobs. It's not our fault that we didn't have cars to leave," Shatonia Thomas, 27, said as she walked near New Orleans' convention center five days after the storm, still trapped in the destruction with her children, ages 6 and 9.

Money and transportation -- two keys to surviving a natural disaster -- were inaccessible for many who got left behind in the Gulf region's worst squalor.

"It's a different equation for poor people," explained Dan Carter, a University of South Carolina historian. "There's a certain ease of transportation and funds that the middle class in this country takes for granted."

Catina Miller, a 32-year-old grocery deli worker who lived in the Ninth Ward, a poverty-stricken New Orleans enclave created in the 1870s by immigrants who were too poor to find higher ground, said she certainly would have liked to have left the city before the hurricane hit.

"But where can you go if you don't have a car?" she asked. "Not everyone can just pick up and take off."

The fact that New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast were heavily populated with people who could not afford to evacuate was hardly a secret or a surprise:

Jack Harrald, director of the Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management at George Washington University in Washington, said emergency planners have known for years that the poverty and lack of transportation in New Orleans would be a significant problem, but the government spent more time and money preparing itself -- rather than communities -- for disaster. ...

"There's not a lot of interest in this issue, except when there's something dramatic," said Carter, the South Carolina historian. "By and large, the poor are simply out of sight, out of mind."

The poor were out of sight and out of mind. And they were left to die.

This was lethally negligent, but not unusual, or even surprising. This is how it works. The poor in America eventually receive a begrudging, belated assistance that proves far costlier, far less effective and far less efficient than a timelier response. A lot of them usually die before this belated assistance is provided, but this is seen as a helpful reminder that they ought not to become "dependent" upon handouts such as medical care for their children or a rescue from a rooftop. See also HEALTH CARE, AMERICAN STYLE.

John Scalzi discusses what "Being Poor" means in America. Such as, "Being poor is $6 short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap." And especially, "Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so." Read the whole thing. Then print it out, make fliers and pass them around. (Link via Patrick Nielsen Hayden.)

Comments

[Dave Lartigue]

I hate seeing everyone point to race as the factor in who got saved, because that misses the issue. It wasn't race, or at least not simply race. It was class. The left behind were poor. They were also black, because in New Orleans, most of the poor also happen to be black, which is another story. But if the same people had turned white on August 28, they still wouldn't have cars or money or a place to go. They still would have had to try to keep the little they have safe, since they couldn't just rely on insurance to cover it.

Besides, racism is easy to counter. You just point at some black people who got out or some white people who didn't and tah-dah! Argument (supposedly) trumped!

The only way to argue the class issue is to continue the way conservatives have always done, to scream "QUIT TRYING TO START A CLASS WAR!" Because, of course, it's not stomping on poor people that would do such a thing, it's calling attention to it. And of course the Democrats, being good polite people, go, "Oh heavens no, we wouldn't dream of insinuating such a thing, not among gentlemen!" and then we go back to happily killing the poor to make a profit.

[Shag from Brookline]

I recall the expression several years ago (more than 20?) that Americans can vote with their feet. Consider the Okies in the 1920s. How long before they were able to vote? Heck, even the middle class in this economy who have jobs dare not "vote" with their feet on a voluntary basis for fear of losing medical coverage even if they would be able to find a job elsewhere. The poor cannot be expected to "vote" with their feet. And governments (politicians) know this.

[Chad Worsthorne Worthington III]

I don't understand. Why didn't they just withdraw money from their trust funds?

[Lucia]

Well, obviously, Chad (great name btw), because they wanted to end up packed into the Astrodome, which is working out well for them. Didn't Bar tell you?

[Sven]

In digging up ammunition to use against a heartless jackass who believes those who didn't immediately leave suffer a deficit of "personal responsibility," I ran across a useful insight from this study:

The role of income is not simple. If we are referring to leaving one's home, income has no consistent relationship to evacuation. In Lafourche, Plaquemines and southern Tangipahoa lower income residents were more likely to evacuate than higher income residents. But in Orleans, the higher income residents were more likely to evacuate, and in Assumption and St. James, the non-poor (over $25K income) were more likely to evacuate. Furthermore, in six parishes income bore no relationship to evacuation.

However, in six of the nine parishes surveyed prior to Ivan, residents with lower incomes were more likely than those with higher incomes to either evacuate within their parish or go to another nearby evacuating parish Many of these evacuees probably went to friends' or relatives homes, or to a place of employment, where they felt safer than in their own homes.

In the stronger storm, Ivan, low-income evacuees tended to go to safe areas.

Thus, although income is not related in any consistent way to leaving one's home during a recommended evacuation, income is related to the distance traveled, especially if the storm is below a Category 4.

The number of low income residents who remain in harm's way illustrates the need for both education about the need to travel far enough and providing evacuation assistance to those without means.

[Beth]

It wasn't race, or at least not simply race. It was class.

Arguing whether it's race or class is kind of like arguing whether it's the heat or the humidity.

Being poor is waiting in line with 200 other people to apply at a company that has 20 openings. Being black and poor means looking around to see if there are at least 20 white people in that line because you know that if there are, you haven't got a chance.

Being poor is having security follow you around the store because of what you're wearing. Being black and poor means knowing that even if you scraped together enough to afford half-decent clothes, you'd still get the same treatment.

Being poor is showing up half-asleep for the standardized test because you spent most of the night listening to your parents fight about who's fault it was they couldn't make the rent, then being labelled "slow" by the school because you did so badly. Being black and poor means that besides internalizing that label, you take on the unspoken one of being a "worthless n-----r".

if the same people had turned white on August 28, they still wouldn't have cars or money or a place to go.

Yes, but if they'd all been white, would they still have been waiting for help on Sept 2? The poor don't have to be black for the rest of the country to condemn or ignore them, but it helps.

[Mnemosyne]

Beth, it's that nasty conflation of race and class here in the U.S. -- namely, that black people are automatically assumed to be lower-class/working-class and have to be major overachievers to get past that initial perception. (And perhaps not even then -- I'm sure Colin Powell and Condeleeza Rice have some very interesting stories they could tell, if they chose.)

White people, on the other hand, are given an automatic assumption of middle-classness (as are most Asians) that smooths things along, even for lower-class/working-class whites.

Small anecdote: my best friend is a nice Polish girl who grew up in Detroit. But when she told other people this, they'd say, "Oh, Bloomfield Hills? Or Grosse Pointe?" Because a blonde, blue-eyed girl couldn't possibly have grown up near 8 Mile ... even though she did.

[bellatrys]

Yes, but if they had been white, would htere have been endless news reports of "looters" and now-discredited propaganda of atrocities committed, which both frightened some who would have gone in to rescue them - can you imagine Natinal Guardsmen afraid to go in and rescue poor white Irish Americans in South Boston, if we had been hit in New England? Or going in expecting a "Little Mog" and bing shcked to find grateful nurses instead of bloodthirsty mobs?

Would it have taken so long to debunk, to awaken pity and force the reaction of Americans spontaneously rushing to rescue them, and to start screaming at the government for its inactivity and worse yet, active interference with humanitarian aid? Would I have had to argue with nice suburban ladies a against the images of looters they were seeing, asking them what they would do if they were stuck and had to take care of their children, and how they "knew' that most of the looters were stupidly taking TVs, Tvs, TVs, TVs?

Would it have taken FOX newsmen standing in shit up to their ankles, inarticulate with shock, and a white pop singer standing amid grateful tearful thirsty dark faces, like something off a special about Ethiopia, to shock America - and only some of America, as you can see by reading the comments at Jane Galts or the trolls at Orcinus or Pandagon or Feministe (even I got one) - into acting, instead of going ugh, those vermin - and while Clintonistas once again debated hotly whether the word "genocide" was allowable or immoral, forgetting that there is an intermediary stage, such as was used at Kirkuk, and in the Indian Territory, called "ethnic cleansing",,,

Yes, I grant you, they don't care about the Cajuns either - they don't have the money to make campaign contributions, and they counted on the rest of you Yankees not caring about them either, bunch a stupid dumfucks voting against their own interests, Republic of Jesusland, Fuck the South - they counted on that as much as they counted on black Americans, having had the vote stolen from them overtly, before the cameras, twice now with no public outcry from white America, rising as they did in 1967. That didn't happen; but they can spin, they're good at that. Theyve been doing it since before they took a selfish movie star turned politician with a bloodthirsty bent and a willingness to do absolutely anything to defend his privileged status, and turned him into an altruist and a hero even as he and his cronies - or handlers? - looted the taxes we had paid and punished us for being poor, and committed treason to get elected and to stay elected, playing one hand against the other with Iran Contra - which they also got away with, because - well, why did they get away with it?

Because the mess was so byzantine that almost nobody could follow it, unlike Watergate; because there was not the internet, to pull it all together and stop it from being memoryholed; because they wre able to provide bread and more circuses, and because looking to hard at it would require admitting that we, including the Reagan Democrats, had been conned and hard.

But when contemplating the Rape of New Orleans, don't think for a moment that the people who planned this forgot that it was 2/3 black and that that fraction encompassed most of the poor.

They counted on it.

What they didn't count on was (most) Americans humanity, even after years of Limbutt and America's Most Wanted and COPS, trumping their xenophobia, or Notherners' scorn of Southern rednecks. And I think this - not oversight, but the conviction that everyone out there is as you yourself are, that all talk of equality and tolerance all these years was just as they believe forced on Americans by the Liberal PC Gestapo, and nothing more than lip service - will be their undoing. The man who accuses all others of lying and cheating - perhaps his own accounts ought to be looked at a little more closely.

[bellatrys]

And they desperately don't want you to ask why most blacks are disproportionately poor, because then you get back to the problem of racism; and they desperately don't want you asking why so many whites down south are poor, and the infrastructre rotten; because that will remind you of the lies and betrayal of Reconstruction, and perhaps Sen. Byrd standing on the floor of the chamber, arguing against us destroying Iraq before it was too late, when the Liberal hawks were cheering it as a humanitarian intervention, reminding you [damn]Yankees that it's been a hundred and forty years and we're still waiting for the money that you promised us and the repairs taht went into the pockets of the Carpetbaggers...

...and before the waters of Lake Ponchartrain had even stopped pouring over the broken dams, Halliburton had already been awarded another no-bid contract, after Bunnatine Greenhouse fired for incompetence, and the military-industrial complex doesn't even bother to pretend that it doesn't own both the Pentagon and the White House these days...

[Duane]

Breathe..

[Mnemosyne]

It's stuff like Katrina that makes me realize just how hard the right-wingers have to work to keep us set against one another, because I read stories about shallow, selfish Westsiders waiting in line for hours to donate to hurricane victims.

I do think that Americans are, as a rule, basically fair people. They don't want to feel like someone else is getting more than their share, but they're more than willing to share what they have for people who need it even more. I mean, I've even heard of homeless shelters here in Los Angeles who set up donation points because their clients -- men and women who are themselves homeless (and, often, ill) wanted to donate what little they had to help the hurricane victims.