As a society, we suffer from attention deficit disorder. One minute it’s Iraq, the next it’s Paris Hilton, then on to the mine disaster and thence to Darfur. We are bombarded by snippets, like a manic bumper car jostled now in this direction, now in that.
Oh, we are engaged after a fashion, but our engagements turn out to be spasms.
This week is the anniversary of one such spasm. Its name was Katrina, and it happened just two years ago. Rarely has the nation been so moved as by the reports from New Orleans and the nearby communities that were so badly devastated. And perhaps never had the impact of race and poverty been revealed to us so forcefully.
Writing (in this space) at the time, I described what almost none of us had known before the awesome hurricane: “The city’s black population, as we now all know from the television reports, are — most of them — poor, very poor. And until the flood, they were also largely invisible. Now, they disturb our waking hours. Who are these people, these huddled masses yearning to be — to be what? Fed? Housed? Or simply: noticed.” And I then went on to observe that, “We will never know how different it would have been had a neighborhood of middle class whites been the principal victims of the flood.”
I was mistaken about that, because now we do know, and what we know is decidedly unpleasant.
The rebuilding and repairing of New Orleans has moved along more slowly than predicted, far more slowly than is required if the city’s residents are to be reasonably safe from the effects of future hurricanes. Surely New Orleans is not on target, as the president promised, to “rise again and be better still.”
One of the reasons for that is the failure to rebuild the 77,000 destroyed rental units that once housed a large number of New Orleans’s poorest citizens. Nor is that failure the product of neglect; in many cases, it is quite purposeful.
“Rental units” at a price poor people can afford, built in the neighborhoods where they would be best insulated from natural calamity, would intrude on the middle class character of the housing. According to The New York Times, “at least five jurisdictions in Louisiana and Mississippi — St. Bernard, St. John the Baptist and Jefferson parishes in Louisiana, and Pascagoula and Ocean Springs in Mississippi — have begun revoking permits for trailers or allowing their zoning exemptions to expire.” Those moves affect families still living in 7,400 trailers across the Gulf Coast — at the same time that there is money in place to build only 1,000 new affordable rental units.
Race, anyone? There’s no readily available racial census of the remaining 30,000 evacuees, but the informed estimates tell us that at least 90% of them are black. And we know their fate: Come the annual anniversary of the disaster, they’ll get their 15 minutes of attention and we will cluck our tongues once more, very sincerely.
Whether or not New Orleans should have been rebuilt at all, given the vast engineering challenge it represents, fact is all levels of government agreed to rebuild it and billions of dollars were allocated to the task. And once the decision was taken, we outsiders were entitled to nurture a tiny hope that the result would be a creative and inspiring response to the challenges of race and poverty (and their intersection) that were so shockingly revealed to us during the days when the news was all Katrina, all the time.
Back then, I indulged myself such a dollop of hope. But I had the foresight to write also, “These poor people may have lost everything, but they have not lost their invisibility. Wait a week, or a month or two, and they will be gone, out of sight, out of mind.”
It is right to feel anger, and shame as well. And our government? Where history and circumstance called for grand vision and sustained effort, we got instead sophomoric cheerleading and constricted effort — and de facto racial discrimination. So today, the state of flood control remains uncertain, though safer for whites than for blacks, and the state of new housing for displaced poor people, almost all black, is disgraceful.
In 1945, Frank Sinatra starred in a film version of a song that became, at the time, a very big hit, and which has lasted through the decades since. The song was a schmaltzy hymn to America — at least to the America that could be.
It was called “The House I Live In,” and a typical verse reads: “The house I live in, a plot of earth, a street; the grocer and the butcher, and the people that I meet; the children in the playground, the faces that I see; all races and religions, that’s America to me.” We know from its writers that it was intended as a song against antisemitism in particular, against bigotry in general.
But when the film was edited, a key verse was omitted. (This so enraged one of the song’s writers, Abel Meeropol — who, with his wife, would later adopt the children of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg — that he stormed out of the theater where he was watching it. Meeropol also wrote Billie Holliday’s signature song, “Strange Fruit.” And Earl Robinson, his co-writer on “The House I Live In,“ wrote “Ballad for Americans,” Paul Robeson’s signature song.)
The omitted words: “The house I live in, my neighbors white and black; the people who just came here, or from generations back; the town hall and the soapbox, the torch of liberty; a home for all God’s children — that’s America to me.”
The omission happened in 1945. It is now 2007.
Mr. Fein's comments startle me. Perhaps he was totally amazed that some of our poorest citizens live in New Orleans. However, Mr. Fein may never have visited Appalachia. The coal mining regions located there are full of the absolute, I am not kidding, absolute poorest people in America. New Orleans may have been profiled as poor, but the poorest live in a different part of America. Appalachia is home to people who are so poor that they cannot even afford to provide underwear or shoes for their children. IF they have indoor plumbing it has an overflowing septic tank for collection and the waste floods the roads, as there is no sewer system to handle the waste stream. The Head Start program often utilized by the poor of New Orleans was actually started by President Johnson for the poor of Appalachia for there were and still are far too many extremely poor Americans in Appalachia who lag behind even the poorest black child in New Orleans. We all cry with the loss of the coalminers who die in the mine cave-ins there. However, no star like Oprah provides Disneyland trips with exclusive ride usage for the children of the miners we lose form appalachia. Race plays a part here. MANY who live in Appalachia are Caucasion, not of African descent. So, if Mr. Fein is looking at poverty in our country, perhaps a little trip along a winding road up the side of a mountain looking for homes with outhouses or for roads flooded with septic tank overflow or even looking at barefoot children who are that way due to true poverty might help him to get a better picture of poverty in America.
When I read the Forward, I might agree or disagree with its point of view - yet, always, it's obvious that the newspaper is presenting a Jewish perspective to events and ideas of our times. This article has me stumped. What is the special Jewish angle that brings such an article to be published in the Forward and not in the Ashtabula Star-Beacon?
As a New Orleans resident who finally will be moving back into my house next month (after more than two years), I too am startled by what I have read here. But for a different reason than that of the last comment. Perhaps you can be excused for not knowing better, but there's no excuse for publishing and furthering your lack of knowledge of what happened and how it affected thousands of Americans of ALL socioeconomic, religious, and racial backgrounds. Yes, you were mistaken when you previously said, "We will never know how different it would have been had a neighborhood of middle class whites been the principal victims of the flood.” But it was a different mistake than that to which you seem to recognize. It was your predicate that was wrong; it would come as a great surprise to my neighbors and thousands of others, mostly mostly white and mostly middle and upper middle class (and many, like me, Jewish if that matters), to know that we were not victims, or "principal victims" of the flood. But alas we fit nicely into only half of your theory; that is, you are correct that the nation suffers from ADD and that so many have "moved on" to other matters, snippets at a time. Part of your thesis is well taken, but you do great disservice to it, and to us, when you advance it through a racial prism. We have all been forgotten here, and we are all waiting for the federal government to make good on Bush's promise at Jackson Square to "do what it takes" to repair the damages caused by the federal government's admitted fault. It is shameful to continue to perpetuate the myth that it is "only" poor blacks who are the victims.
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