A Year Ago Today...

Last night on NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams had a decent interview with a Michael Dyson, author of Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster. In it, both men seemed to make some really great points, but the key point made by Mr. Dyson is, to paraphrase, that America squandered a huge opportunity to have a meaningful conversation about race, class and poverty. In other words, we could have rebuilt New Orleans right. It could have become a model city for dealing with poverty and service delivery. We were handed a clean slate and an opportunity to address more than a devastated city and population, but also to address the causes of why things are the way they are in New Orleans.

Later last night, Brian Williams aired a special in which he reflected on his presence and role, and indeed the overall role and presence of "media" in general in New Orleans. It was surprisingly less self-centered than I expected and really became a piece that made some great points about how Katrina became and remained such a huge catastrophe. Again, he made some wonderful points that it was not the media's job to give food and water, which they did how they could. It was the media's job to ask where the heck the food and water...the relief...was, which they did, and which was never answered, except by a fumbling Brown ("the federal government just found out today about the Superdome...").

There was a point at which he aired a brief segment of an interview with Bush, who was angry (Hulk maaaaaaad) and generally indignant that people would call him and his administration racist. He insisted that he wasn't and "rejected" those claims.

My wife and I reflected on that statement and on the scenes that NBC quite effectively put together for their broadcast. It occurred to us that even if Bush and his people are not blatantly racist, what is racist is the catastrophe. The response is racist, and more than that, the fact that the huge black population in New Orleans, at least by media accounts, is predominantly poor is absolutely racist. This is our latent racism on display.

The response was slow. Blatantly racist? Probably not. More of a reflection of incompetence. Latently racist? Certainly. We have sequested our poor into areas that are actually more difficult for us to respond to.

Barbara Bush's comments; blatantly racist. Mmm...kinda, but ignorantly so. I like what Mr. Dyson, above, had to say about them:

But I'll tell you — when Barbara Bush said that, it reinforced the reputation of the Bushes as clueless patricians, No. 1. No. 2, inadvertently, let's be honest, she was right at a certain level.

Here's how she was right: That many of the people who were washed away were washed into better climates, better circumstances than they had before. That's a tragedy. You mean living in the Superdome, or living in the Astrodome, or living in a displaced geography that you had nothing to do with, you didn't grow up in, is better than where you were? For many people, yes. So even though she was right, she was right for the wrong reasons.

That's it; that's it exactly. That is the latent racism I am talking about, and the real catastrophe. That a "displaced geography" is better than your previous circumstances? Tragic. That we continue to let our biggest cities devolve into that circumstance, where it is more difficult to deliver services and aid and emergency displacement actually offers temporary comfort; that is the real tragedy. And that this tragedy focuses on, in a sense of majority, one or two specific minority groups: that's racist.

I love this post from LLPN (from Muckraker) because the "joke" that was played actually offers a real solution; a feasible solution actually applicable to every major urban center in America, but most immediately applicable to the real reconstruction of New Orleans. That the Bush Administration took it as an insult is not surprising. BUT...Mayor Nagan and Governor Blanco would do well to look at the joke's suggestions. They have as much a hand as putting together a real plan for reconstruction as Bush does. After all, Bush has shown that not only will his administration most likely screw it up if they tried, they're really not that interested in the first place.