KATRINA & THE INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSE:

DISASTER RELIEF

For starters, we can assess the response to a formerly invisible problem on an institutional level. To that end, we need not reiterate the failures of President Bush, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Congress, the Senate, state governors and city planners. Others have highlighted their shortcomings in the wake of Katrina. Instead, our institutional inquiry focuses on the four most important lessons that emerge from the government’s lackluster response. The first lesson is: we have a problem. The problem has been outlined above: fellow human beings, often from Black or other minority communities, live in deplorable conditions.

The second lesson is: band-aids don’t work. We pump billions of dollars into solving a problem once disasters occur, but an influx of money to relieve disaster fails to address the heart of the matter: the prior status quo. This is bad policy. Not only is it costly, but disasters like Katrina underscore the extent to which a policy of ignoring domestic problems leaves us under prepared and overwhelmed.

On a human level, the disaster band-aid policy also costs residents anguish, pain and death. Monetarily, disaster relief costs the government billions of dollars, far more than pre-emptive measures—like building adequate infrastructure for everyone and ensuring that city dwellers have at least enough resources to prepare or evacuate when their lives are threatened.

Instead, the government expends our resources abroad before taking care of problems at home. Now that disaster finally forces it to face some domestic problems, the government should realize that its policies merely exacerbate existing problems. Simply put: disasterrelief band-aids do not stick. They cover the wound so long as it is visible, and fall off when the public eye turns back to its previous affairs.

This brings me to the third lesson: the injuries still exist. After applying the band-aid, we think the problem has disappeared, but we have merely made it invisible. Reconstruction efforts may strengthen the levies, but they do not give poor residents jobs; address the failing local educational system; ensure individual mobility, liberty or safety; offer healthcare; or provide opportunities for a better life. Rather, disaster relief policy aims to return the city and its residents to the status quo, with perhaps a few nominal improvements to infrastructure. Once the aid is delivered, the job is “done.” We can then return to “our” lives. For many, that will mean again being poor, disenfranchised, invisible. So the predicament persists. And that takes us to lesson four: we still have a problem.

AFTER KATRINA: IT AIN’T OVER, EVEN AFTER THE FAT LADY SINGS

After slavery, after Jim Crow, after integration, America has yet to achieve the promise of equality. Lamenting the same situation, Cornel West recently wrote that Charlie Parker sang the blues because it was either do that or kill somebody.4 But Charlie Parker’s song is nothing like that of the fat lady who signals the end of dramatized operatic fiction. For we are dealing with reality. In reality, even if Charlie Parker sings, or if Clarence Thomas or Condoleezza Rice sing, it still ain’t over. It won’t be over until everyone lives (not has the theoretical, constitutionally-guaranteed opportunity to live, but lives) the decent life that the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, religious and humanistic mores, democratic and humanitarian norms promise. That project requires an ongoing effort to identify, concern ourselves with, and address problems—even the sort that are invisible to the public eye until disaster strikes.

If Katrina tells us nothing else, it tells us that we must constantly work to ensure justice, even in “invisible” arenas. From Katrina, we learn the outcome of attempts to address the problem of slavery. America’s elite thought they achieved justice by abolishing legal slavery. But then they noticed disparities in the ways Blacks were treated vis-à-vis whites under the Jim Crow regime of segregation. Then they thought they had achieved justice and equality with the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Fergeson.5 But years of injustice, unequal opportunity, disparate resources, and routine exclusions of Blacks drove the Supreme Court to declare in Brown v. Board of Education that separate was “inherently unequal.”6 Then they thought they had achieved justice and equality with “integration” or at least nonsegregation. Now we’ve got it!

But it is the same old story all over again—both in terms of slavery’s legacy and also quite literally. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood prior to Katrina, and it devastated Louisiana along with six other states. Then, as now, the disaster took its greatest toll on the most impoverished people: Blacks, who were sometimes forced at gunpoint to repair the levees. Then, disaster relief housing efforts came in the form of refugee camps, the conditions of which were so horrible that Herbert Hoover asked the media to overlook reports that detailed those deplorable conditions. He promised in exchange to effect reforms for Blacks after the election. He failed to make good on his promise.

Historians and analysts credit these events with spurring on the voting rights movement of the time, the shift in Southern Black allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic party,

and providing the spark for New Deal proposals for more government services. They also credit these events with major demographic shifts such as Blacks’ Great Migration to the North and a great deal of Black cultural output. Examples of the latter include folksongs and blues music such as those by Bessie Smith and “When the Levee Breaks,” by Memphis Minnie (If it keeps on raining, levee’s goin’ to break / And the water gonna come in, have no place to stay … I works on the levee mama both night and day / I ain’t got nobody, keep the water away). That spoke of the days of segregation. But after segregation, not all that much has changed. Notwithstanding all the advances in race relations, the parallels of 1927 Louisiana and 2005 Louisiana are striking. Reality on the ground says that a regime of nonsegregation does not ensure integration, and even if it did, integration does not ensure equality or justice.

For all our progress and all our success, what of the people who lack opportunity, who cannot speak of generations of entrenched wealth and Ivy League legacies, who can barely make a living, who cannot access proper education, who are caught in a cycle of poverty-fomenting violence and drugpushing, who are stuck in Louisiana when Katrina hits?