Unstable Foundations: Not Forgetting New Orleans

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0316-20.htm

Unstable Foundations: Not Forgetting New Orleans
by Rebecca Solnit

Riflemen and Rescuers

On March 5, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama went south to compete for the limelight on the 42nd anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," the day in March 1965 when Alabama law enforcement drove Civil Rights demonstrators off the Edmund Pettus Bridge and back into Selma. Somehow, the far larger and more desperate attempt of a largely African-American population to march across a bridge less than two years ago, during the days after Hurricane Katrina, and the even more vicious response, has never quite entered the mainstream imagination. Few outside New Orleans, therefore, understand that the city became a prison in the days after 80% of it was flooded (nor has it fully sunk in that the city was flooded not by a hurricane but by the failure of levees inadequately built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers).

According to a little-noted Los Angeles Times report from that moment, "Authorities in St. Bernard Parish, to the east, stacked cars to seal roads from the Crescent City." Not only were relief supplies and rescuers kept out of the city, but many who could have rescued themselves or reached outside rescue efforts were forcibly kept in. The spectacle of the suffering and squalor of crowds trapped without food, water, or sanitation in sweltering heat that so transfixed the nation was not just the result of incompetence, but of malice. While the media often tended to portray the victims as largely criminals, government officials shifted the focus from rescue to the protection of property and the policing of the public. There's no way to count how many died as a result of all this.

The Mississippi-straddling Crescent City Connection Bridge was closed to pedestrians by law enforcement from Gretna, the mostly white community across the river. They fired their guns over the heads of women and children seeking to flee the dire conditions of the Superdome and Convention Center, as well as the heat and thirst of the devastated city, driving back thousands attempting to escape their captivity in squalor. There have been no consequences from any of these acts, though Congressional Representatives Cynthia McKinney and John Conyers have denounced them as hate crimes and called for investigations, and the Reverend Lennox Yearwood said, "Can you imagine during 9/11, the thousands who fled on foot to the Brooklyn Bridge, not because they wanted to go to Brooklyn, but because it was their only option? What if they had been met by six or eight police cars blocking the bridge, and cops fired warning shots to turn them back?"

During my trips to the still half-ruined city, some inhabitants have told me that they, in turn, were told by white vigilantes of widespread murders of black men in the chaos of the storm and flood. One local journalist assured me that he tried to investigate the story, but found it impossible to crack. Reporters, he said, were not allowed to inspect recovered bodies before they were disposed of. These accounts suggest that, someday, an intrepid investigative journalist may stand on its head the media hysteria of the time (later quietly recanted) about African-American violence and menace in flooded New Orleans. Certainly, the most brutal response to the catastrophe was on the part of institutional authority at almost every level down to the most local.

These stories are important, if only to understand what New Orleans is recovering from -- not just physical devastation, but social fissures and racial wounds in a situation that started as a somewhat natural disaster and became a socially constructed catastrophe. Nothing quite like it has happened in American history. It's important to note as well that many racial divides were crossed that week and after -- by people who found common cause inside the city -- by, for instance, the "Cajun Navy" of white boat-owners who got into flooded areas to rescue scores of people.

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[BlacknBlue in Red NC]

1. Excellent article. Thanks for sharing it.

[Kurovski]

2. K&R.(nt)