"THE rapper Kanye West spoke for many. "George Bush doesn't care about black people" was his judgment on the President's performance in dealing with Hurricane Katrina's horrific impact.
The pictures from New Orleans could scarcely have had a more powerful impact: there, for all the world to see, was an all too graphic illustration of how the United States remains divided by race and income to an extent that many if not most Americans would prefer not to contemplate. To cynics, the President's flagship education policy, No Child Left Behind, had gained a sibling: No White Left Behind in New Orleans. A Pew Institute poll found that 66% of black Americans felt the government would have reacted faster if the stranded victims had been mainly white rather than black.
This rapidly emerging conventional wisdom was articulated by Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean. "Race was a factor in the death toll from Hurricane Katrina," Dean told members of the National Baptist Convention of America. "We must come to terms with the ugly truth that skin colour, age and economics played a deadly role in who survived and who did not."
Other Democrats agreed. "To the President of the United States, I simply say that God cannot be pleased with our response," said Congressman Elijah Cummings at a Congressional Black Caucus news conference. "We cannot allow it to be said that the difference between those who lived and those who died in this great storm and flood of 2005 was nothing more than poverty, age or skin colour."
Newspapers around the world have been quick to repeat that claim, lapping up the opportunity to condemn the President and repeating cliches about white, Republican racists. Such stories conveniently ignored the fact that hundreds of thousands of black citizens did manage to leave the city. It was the poor - mostly though not exclusively black - who were left stranded. Incompetence rather than malice is a more accurate verdict on the performance of government - including that of the black mayor of New Orleans itself.
Nonetheless, the impact of the last fortnight upon a black community that already feels marginalised and shut out from the political process should not be underestimated. "You'd have to go back to slavery, or the burning of black towns, to find a comparable event that has affected black people this way," says Darnell Hunt, head of the African American studies department at UCLA.
The Republican party, conscious that 90% of those African-Americans who vote do so for Democrat candidates, has been making a concerted effort to reach out to black voters. Last November Bush won 20% more of the black vote than he had in 2000, even if this still only amounted to 11% of the total available. Party chairman Ken Mehlman has been touring the country speaking to black audiences in an effort to persuade them that Republicans take black concerns seriously. In July Mehlman used a speech to admit that the GOP had made mistakes on racial issues. "Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarisation. I come here as Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong" he said, essentially disowning Richard Nixon's famous "southern strategy" that played on the racial fears of white voters disaffected by Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legislation. Mehlman makes the case that it is unhealthy for one party to win 90% of the black vote and that, furthermore, Democrats have taken black support for granted and failed to deliver upon their promises.
Although the President regularly speaks about education and the importance of using testing to drive up standards - an issue of enormous concern to black parents in crumbling urban schools - and has increased education spending, he rarely talks about poverty or other social issues that are disproportionately important to the black population. This smacks of indifference more than malice, but it also ties in with a longstanding Republican belief that government is frequently the cause of, rather than the solution to, problems. That Republican outreach effort to blacks - always a long-term project that would not bring political rewards in this electoral cycle - may come to naught in the aftermath of the government's lethargic and ill-planned response to Katrina, however.
"There is so much anger out there, I think it is going to be very difficult for Republicans to break through to African Americans," says Ron Walters, director of the African-American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland. This is extremely damaging - it's a powerful, emotional, family-oriented issue that goes right to the heart of people. Mistakes like this have a shelf life. This is going to be with us for a long, long time."
Members of Congress and White house staffers need not travel far to be reminded of the disparities in income and opportunity that lurk beneath happier statistics demonstrating the continuing emergence of a large black middle class. Washington DC, like New Orleans a city in which the majority of citizens are black, remains a segregated city nearly 150 years after the Civil War. Here, the black community is not out of sight, merely out of mind.
New Orleans at least has a black middle class that was able to escape the worst effects of Katrina. The capital no longer has. The middle classes fled the city for the Maryland suburbs after rioting burnt out parts of the city following the assassination of Martin Luther King. They have not returned, leaving much of Washington as a black ghetto, plagued by drugs, crime and some of the worst schools in the nation.
If Katrina has any positive outcome, it may be that it will spark an honest and constructive, if necessarily painful, discussion on class and race in modern America. Only an optimist would bank on it, however. The poor have been seen and heard these past two weeks, but before long they may well slip back into the shadows whence they came, all but invisible in a country that prefers to dwell on success and wealth."-from Alex Massie's story in The Scotsman.
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