I wrote a post earlier called Katrina highlights America’s racial divide. I was reading over at Ms. Julien’s List and she posted a comment from Marla P. Stevens that adds so much more to the racial prism through which I see the reaction to Katrina in New Orleans:
Ah, but the treatment of NOLA was different than that of hard-hit areas in Mississippi. True, both have suffered greatly from FEMA/ShrubCo ineptitude but:
Private aid was not prevented from coming in to Mississippi.
The press was not subjected to repeated attempts to keep them out of affected areas in Mississippi.
People attempting to leave affected areas for help in Mississippi were not prevented from leaving by a phalanx line of warning shot-firing, gun-pointing-at-people’s-heads swaggering, racist epithet hurling, caricature of pre-civil-rights Southern sheriffs who subsequently stole what little food and water the attempted.
People weren’t held in putrid facilities sans the basic necessities of life at the mercy of violent criminals and prevented from leaving by officials pointing guns at them in Mississippi.
There was no forced diaspora in Mississippi. In New Orleans, care was not taken to keep families, much less neighborhoods intact. People were actively denied information about to where they were being transported, much less given choice about where they were sent. Disregard for maintaining even the togetherness of parents and small children or the elderly in their care was rampant to the point of giving officials the appearance of being slave traders.
There were no calls from officialdom to summarily execute all looters, no questions asked, including those taking mere sustenance, health, and sanitation related goods to save lives in Mississippi.
The racism is so ingrained, so institutionalized, so much a part of white America’s collective psyche that we’re incapable of its awareness without going through a very painful individual process of self-awareness that most of us don’t see the need to do precisely because of our own racism.
It is a solipsism of unacknowledged shame that, sadly, not even something as blatant as the NOLA/Katrina horror seems able to penetrate.
Do your part. Seek out quality antiracism programs. Attend and support them until you bleed and achieve enough awareness that you begin to beg for more lest you have not fully plumbed the depths of your soul.
