Race
After 9/11, a similar concert to the Concert for Hurricane Relief was held to raise money. Among the artists who performed, Bruce Springsteen sang "My City in Ruins." Though about a different subject matter, it was as fitting as any song I could think of. After the concert, my Dad said that it was a testament to the Springsteen the songwriter that he already had a song like that in his catalog.
I felt the same way after hearing Aaron Neville sing "Louisiana, 1927" the other night. As ballsy as it was to sing a song who's main lyric is "They're trying to wash us away," it was equally as impressive that Randy Newman's song, which now seems so prescient, existed in the first place.
Neville's performance, and then subsequently Kanye West's rant helped focus the spotlight of this tragedy on race. As America watched a sea of black faces, many of them floating in the miles of standing water, the national conversation changed to something that many in White America thought we'd been able to put behind us.
Make no mistake about it, race just became the number one issue in American politics.
Of course, the first family's own comments during the first couple of days haven't helped. Bush, on the ground in Mississippi, felt it necessary to talk, longingly, about the day when he can sit on the front porch of Trent Lott's new house.
But his mama did him one better, yesterday, while touring the refugee camp's in Houston:
What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (chuckle)--this is working very well for them.
An mp3 of the quote is available here, for those who wish to hear it for themselves (which will be followed by the inevitable sound of your jaw, hitting the floor). I won't make the "Let them eat cake" joke, but there is obviously a disconnect between the realities of being poor and the realities of being a matriarch of a powerful family.
And, of course, economics are a huge part of this. The vast majority of the people left in New Orleans were well below the poverty line. These were people who, in the weeks before the hurricane, were going about their daily lives doing important work like trying to figure out where they would get enough money to feed their families tomorrow. They didn't have money for bus tickets for their families, much less the money to put them up when if they got out of town.
Poverty is a huge issue in our country, but poverty is not a separate issue from race. All you had to do, this week, was watch television. The people who were dying were black. The people who were too poor to get out of town were black. The people who packed into the Superdome were black. New Orleans is one of the poorest cities in America, and we saw the evidence today that the burden poverty creates is being shouldered by the black community.
This is why I'm a liberal. For years I've told my skeptical white friends that race is still an issue in America. It's true that there is not as much out-in-the-open racism, though that certainly still occurs, but the racism in this country has become institutionalized. It's hard for us white people, so accustomed to living with our white privilege, to understand it because we do not live with it. My friends are tired of hearing me say this, but I firmly believe that, if you put me and a black person in the same situations in life, I will have an easier time than the black person.
It's been a tough pill for them to swallow, this week, as I keep pointing to the television, saying, "Look! There it is! There are real racial, social, and economic injustices in this world, and today, people are dying for it." There are real consequences that come from what white American has largely viewed as a philosophical discussion. This is what happens when a civilization declines to help the least privileged in their midst: They are condemned to die.
Even the most conservative of the small-government conservatives agree on this: This is the sort of thing that government is supposed to do for their people. Government is supposed to do the things that individuals can't do for themselves. They are supposed to build roads, they are supposed to protect infrastructure, and for the love of God, they are supposed to get people out of harm's way when disaster is bearing down on them.
It would be as if Rome had fallen because the government didn't think it important enough to spend the money to build walls.
To be sure, the failure in New Orleans was a failure on city, state, regional, and national levels. And, yet, we've already seen everyone, on every level, try to pass the buck.
The blame will fall on someone, but my gut tells me that, as the public watched black Americans die in staggering and one-sided numbers, the person that gets blamed won't be the black Mayor of New Orleans who was on the ground from minute one.
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