Katrina: Contemporary Screams of Agony

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There are no words to express what we have witnessed in news accounts out of Louisiana and Mississippi.  Overused terms such as revulsion, horror, terror and outrage just don’t compensate.  The combined federal abandonment and neglecting to death of perhaps tens of thousands of mostly Black people in hurricane Katrina’s affected regions and the failure of a mostly White dominated media to accurately and fairly report their truths in its aftermath have been absolutely stunning. 

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Most of us in possession of historical contextuality are not amazed by this desertion and resulting media propaganda – which serve one another so well.  We remind ourselves that the suffering, dying and dead in these areas were neglected long before there was a Katrina.  The venerable Julian Bond recently referred to poverty-stricken Black folk in the South as “just as disenfranchised as ever.”  As recently as August 2005 the Black Congressional Caucus conducted a bus tour of Mississippi to “highlight the growing list of disparities that plague the African American community, focusing on disparities in healthcare, retirement security and affordable housing.”  They surely know as most do, that much of the North and most of the South including New Orleans was built exclusively by the hand and back of enslaved Black African folk of recent ancestry, and that they are therefore protecting a national treasure. 

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We embroider together our knowledge of historical conditions with the present and are staggered by the devastating screams of mass hunger and thirst and the sounds of torture we hear from unbearable numbers of Black people.  We are keenly aware of the psychological impact of living alongside the dying and dead (as our foremothers and fathers did on slave ships), and the sheer magnitude of our collective loss.  We know how the psychosocial development of Black children in the region are being affected every day, and how that will affect us all as a people.  We try to imagine how brotha’s and sistah’s with HIV/AIDS, diabetes and cancers must be suffering with no medication and medical care. 

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The facts are we’re witnessing the ravages of living in a racist (sexist, and homophobic) society wherein Black lives are consistently treated less valuably than White life.  Most White people simply don’t move as quickly, think as lucidly, contemplate as masterfully, or speak as prophetically regarding specifically Black life.   Though there is plenty of room to be critical of some White’s, FEMA and the federal government as a whole - and I am - this is for those of us who would reduce the force of reality as if devouring a bag of chips for comfort or drinking several cocktails toward intoxication.  Many more of us Black folk need to interrupt our own illusions to comprehend that ever-present racism as it hovers all around us clawing away at our past and potential successes.  Look, so you can see it evidenced all around you - even through your aloofness and privilege – look.  Your seeing, dear reader and your mindfulness might have you intelligently contribute to a plan for our collective survival as solid as our individual household plans for escaping natural disasters.  Arguably one of the most brilliant, prolific thinkers of the early 1900’s, a Black intellectual superstar, Dr. W.E.B. Dubois saw himself as “bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil…”  We should afford ourselves and our own people no less indulgence in our lifetime. 

http://www.blackcommentator.com/150/150_howcott_katrina.html

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1. I look forward to reading this. Thanks for posting.