Race, Bush, and New Orleans: Darryl Pinckney in the NYRB

[swag]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18294

On Our Own
By Darryl Pinckney

excerpt:

The novelist Richard Ford, who lived in New Orleans for many years, observes that Mayor Nagin had been brave to tell everyone to leave. People in the Superdome were alive, he says, because they were there, not somewhere else. But then conditions quickly deteriorated, and the mayor was the only public official who strongly protested the federal government's failure to help. Of the 15,000 people shipped to the Houston Astrodome, the vast majority were black. The crowd at the convention center included some white people, but the feeling among black people seems to be that the press and television once again found an occasion to portray black people as lawless; that if there had been an equal number of whites stranded in a destroyed city, federal government help would have been dispatched more quickly; and that at least something of the deep racism in US society has been exposed inadvertently —to an international audience.

The Astrodome is no solution. The army bases that have been closed recently in the South as economy measures should have been opened up. It is a scandal that it took so long for there to be air drops of any kind. Maybe Bush can't respond convincingly to the calamity because to do so would require thinking, along New Deal lines, of the kind of governmental agencies and radical programs that he is ideologically opposed to.

After years of inadequate investment in the country's infrastructure, this could be the first grave consequence of its misspending. The US telephone systems, bridges, railroads, and highways are in poor shape. The authorities were told twenty-five years ago that the New Orleans levees could not withstand a storm of Katrina's magnitude, but a city that votes Democratic wasn't going to get the necessary allocations to refortify them. In fact Bush heavily cut requests for money to strengthen the levees holding back Lake Pontchatrain.

We are becoming like the countries we criticize and pity, places where the state and the society have less and less to do with each other. We are on our own, but then black people have always known that.