Sunday, September 04, 2005

[+] What Happens to a Race Deferred [reprinted from t r u t h o u t.org]

What Happens to a Race Deferred
By Jason DeParle
The New York Times

Sunday 04 September 2005

The white people got out. Most of them, anyway. If
television and newspaper images can be deemed a
statistical sample, it was mostly black people who
were left behind. Poor black people, growing more
hungry, sick and frightened by the hour as faraway
officials counseled patience and warned that rescues
take time.

What a shocked world saw exposed in New Orleans
last week wasn't just a broken levee. It was a
cleavage of race and class, at once familiar and
startlingly new, laid bare in a setting where they
suddenly amounted to matters of life and death.
Hydrology joined sociology throughout the story line,
from the settling of the flood-prone city, where
well-to-do white people lived on the high ground, to
its frantic abandonment.

The pictures of the suffering vied with reports of
marauding, of gunshots fired at rescue vehicles and
armed bands taking over the streets. The city of
quaint eccentricity - of King Cakes, Mardi Gras beads
and nice neighbors named Tookie - had taken a
Conradian turn.

In the middle of the delayed rescue, the New
Orleans mayor, C.Ray Nagin, a local boy made good from
a poor, black ward, burst into tears of frustration as
he denounced slow moving federal officials and called
for martial law.

Even people who had spent a lifetime studying race
and class found themselves slack-jawed.

"This is a pretty graphic illustration of who gets
left behind in this society - in a literal way," said
Christopher Jencks, a sociologist glued to the
televised images from his office at Harvard. Surprised
to have found himself surprised, Mr. Jencks took to
thinking out loud. "Maybe it's just an in-the-face
version of something I already knew," he said. "All
the people who don't get out, or don't have the
resources, or don't believe the warning are
African-American."

"It's not that it's at odds with the way I see
American society," Mr. Jencks said. "But it's at odds
with the way I want to see American society."

Last week it was how others saw American society,
too, in images beamed across the globe. Were it not
for the distinctive outlines of the Superdome, the
pictures of hovering rescue helicopters might have
carried a Somalian dateline. The Sri Lankan ambassador
offered to help raise foreign aid.

Anyone who knew New Orleans knew that danger
lurked behind the festive front. Let the good times
roll, the tourists on Bourbon Street were told. Yet in
every season, someone who rolled a few blocks in the
wrong direction wound up in the city morgue.

Unusually poor (27.4 percent below the poverty
line in 2000), disproportionately black (over
two-thirds), the Big Easy is also disproportionately
murderous - with a rate that was for years among the
country's highest.

Once one of the most mixed societies, in recent
decades, the city has become unusually segregated, and
the white middle class is all but gone, moved north
across Lake Pontchartrain or west to Jefferson Parish
- home of David Duke, the one-time Klansman who ran
for governor in 1991 and won more than half of the
state's white vote.

Shortly after I arrived in town two decades ago as
a fledgling reporter, I was dispatched to cover a
cheerleading tryout, and I asked a grinning,
half-drunk accountant where he was from, city or
suburb. "White people don't live in New Orleans," he
answered with a where-have-you-been disdain.

For those who loved it, its glories as well as its
flaws, last week brought only heartbreak. So much of
New Orleans, from its music and its food to its
architecture, had shown a rainbow society at its best,
even as everyone knew it was more complicated than
that.

"New Orleans, first of all, is both in reality and
in rhetoric an extraordinarily successful
multicultural society," said Philip Carter, a
developer and retired journalist whose roots in the
city extend back more at least four generations. "But
is also a multicultural society riven by race and
class, and all this has been exposed by these stormy
days. The people of our community are pitted against
each other across the barricades of race and class
that six months from now may be last remaining levees
in New Orleans."

No one was immune, of course. With 80 percent of
the city under water, tragedy swallowed the privilege
and poor, and traveled spread across racial lines.

But the divides in the city were evident in things
as simple as access to a car. The 35 percent of black
households that didn't have one, compared with just 15
percent among whites.

"The evacuation plan was really based on people
driving out," said Craig E. Colten, a geologist at
Louisiana State University and an expert on the city's
vulnerable topography. "They didn't have buses. They
didn't have trains."

As if to punctuate the divide, the water
especially devastated the Ninth Ward, among city's
poorest and lowest lying.

"Out West, there is a saying that water flows to
money," Mr. Colten said. "But in New Orleans, water
flows away from money. Those with resources who
control where the drainage goes have always chosen to
live on the high ground. So the people in the low
areas were hardest hit."

Outrage grew as the week wore on, among black
politicians who saw the tragedy as a reflection of a
broader neglect of American cities, and in the
blogosphere.

"The real reason no one is helping is because of
the color of these people!" wrote "myfan88" on the
Flickr blog. "This is Hotel Rwanda all over again."

"Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights
movement fought to achieve, a society where many black
people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as
they were by legal segregation laws?" wrote Mark
Naison, director of the urban studies program at
Fordham, on another blog.

One question that could not be answered last week
was whether, put to a similar test, other cities would
fracture along the same lines.

At one level, everything about New Orleans appears
sui generis, not least its location below sea level.
Many New Orleanians don't just accept the jokes about
living in a Banana Republic. They spread them.

But in a quieter catastrophe, the 1995 heat wave
that killed hundreds of Chicagoans, blacks in
comparable age groups as whites died at higher rates -
in part because they tended to live in greater social
isolation, in depopulated parts of town. As in New
Orleans, space intertwined with race.

And the violence? Similarly shocking scenes had
erupted in Los Angeles in 1992, after the acquittal of
white police officers charged with beating a black
man, Rodney King. Newark, Detroit, Washington - all
burned in the race riots of the 1960's. It was for
residents of any major city, watching the mayhem, to
feel certain their community would be immune.

With months still to go just to pump out the water
that covers the city, no one can be sure how the
social fault lines will rearrange. But with white
flight a defining element of New Orleans in the recent
past, there was already the fear in the air this week
that the breached levee would leave a separated
society further apart.

"Maybe we can build the levees back," said Mr.
Carter. "But that sense of extreme division by class
and race is going to long survive the physical
reconstruction of New Orleans."

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