Over the past few weeks, I sat and watched television coverage of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in horror, much like I did when I saw the carnage from Sept. 11 envelop America’s collective consciousness. I was curious about a lot of things: With all of the Doppler radar and state-of-the-art meteorology equipment our scientists possess, how did this happen on such a catastrophic level?
As I talked to people about the many unfortunate citizens who died in New Orleans and other surrounding cities, I kept running into the common theme of ethnicity and economic status as a reason why the response was so delayed. I’m one of those people who believes not everything comes down to race, so I looked for other reasons why this might have happened.
Now, I don’t agree with Kanye West’s shocking declaration at a hurricane relief fundraiser that “George Bush hates black people,” but Bush might not be equally caring about poor people living in port cities such as New Orleans and Biloxi. New Orleans, for example, is a busy sea port, but the economies in Gulf Coast states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama do not come anywhere near those of New York or California.
Hurricane response should not be practiced like some grotesque form of V.I.P. treatment: The more money you make, the better higher quality your services are. We are all American citizens, and therefore we all deserve the equal opportunity to get to safety, do we not?
And just as race became an intricate part of this debate, I stepped back and looked at the ethnic makeup of these cities. I found that New Orleans is 67 percent African-American, Alabama ranks seventh in the nation for percentage of blacks living in the state and Mississippi has a large minority population. But scientific reality also played a role: As we have learned by now, because New Orleans is under sea level, any significant amount of rainfall had the potential to cause great flooding. Many countered my questions about the hurricane response being a racial issue with: “No, the area is hurricane-prone, this just happened to be one of the worst-case scenarios.”
Really? This may be true, but I am curious. Would Manhattan have been evacuated at least a few days ahead of time, not the hourly time frames the New Orleans residents were given? I’m sure Los Angeles would have been notified far in advance if such a powerful meteorological event was to occur. I doubt Detroit, another predominantly black city, would have been quickly evacuated if the Great Lakes suddenly began to pour into the streets. Or if the Chesapeake began to flow into Baltimore – a city with a profile similar in demographics to New Orleans or Washington – would the crews have reached the people just as slowly as the crews in New Orleans?
Public figures like West and several politicians have done little to calm the racial debate in the aftermath of Katrina. Barbara Bush didn’t help the situation, stating “so many people here in the arena [in Houston where evacuees were offered temporary housing] you know, were unprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”
To his credit, Barbara’s son, President Bush, slightly closed the gaping jaws of the American public in response to that comment by accepting full responsibility for the late response in rescuing those in danger. Whether it was a black or white issue, economic priority matter, or simply ‘unprepared unpreparedness’-related issue, one thing is for sure: “The Big Easy” unfortunately seems to now be operating by its other long-standing nickname: “The City That Care Forgot.” Yes, apparently, we did, and we can’t apologize enough.
Athina Tesfa-Yohannes is a sophomore government and politics major. She can be reached at atesfayo@umd.edu.
