The Battle in the Gulf Coast and the War in Iraq

Whether listening to radio, watching television, surfing the internet, reading newspapers, conversing in Laundromats or kicking it at street corners – millions of people throughout the country, and thousands in San Francisco, are asking what Marvin Gaye prophetically sang back in the day: “What’s going on?” And millions more are lending solidarity to the victims of Hurricane Katrina while political contempt for the powers that rule America sharpens. The White House, the nation’s big house, is drowning in trouble waters.

The tragedy of a majority of Black lives loss in Hurricane Katrina and the costly war in Iraq, came home, ironically to rest in ways no one potentially foresaw: that the largely white-led anti-war movement and racial and class oppression in urban and rural America, would inadvertently coalesce, gaining significant common ground. Amid the crisis of Hurricane Katrina, Cindy Sheehan, the mother of fallen G.I., Casey Sheehan, continued her national bus tour gathering popular support against the Iraq war. On Sunday, September 4th, Mrs. Sheehan prayed for the victims of Katrina and remembered her son.

Two weeks ago, the mass media was all-over this story in Crawford, Texas but now, despite the daily media manipulations of trying to turn the tragedy into a renewal of religious faith, millions of people, especially African Americans, ain’t buying it. Despite the outpouring of donations to the American Red Cross and water now pumping out of New Orleans, and 250,000 people in hundreds of FEMA shelters – thousands of people have died and thousands more are displaced.

More than just the levees broke in Lake Ponchatrain on that fateful day. Now we know, through various media reports, that millions were denied by Congress to both the Mississippi and Louisiana irrigation authorities to protect the Gulf coast people from damaging floods. But instead, it’s been admitted, that President Bush deliberately diverted cost savings and national guard troops to support the U.S. military in the Middle East. For centuries, though, justice has been torturously denied to African American people, especially in this part of the country, and unseen by millions of white spectators. Unlike previous black and white televised images of water-hosed African American civil rights protestors in 1963 Alabama, today’s Fox News coverage of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, however, is informed by a corporate and packaged framework, intentionally marketed to a safe, white and de-politicized middle class.

It’s something like a new-and-improved HBO mini-series: digestible, homogenized and a touching replacement for D.W. Griffith’s racist “Birth of a Nation”, with America’s number #1 movie -- the re-make of the 1970s t.v. show “The Dukes of Hazzard” -- a blonde and blue-eyed fun fest, riding deep in a Trans Am adorned by a Confederate flag on the hood. This time in the highlight reels, however, African Americans, other people of color and poor white folks got lynched by a villainous natural disaster. Aside from the strictly controlled imagery on television depicting the struggle of victims in Hurricane Katrina, it can’t be denied any longer that this is the largest displacement of people since the Civil War. And now, the Bush Administration and Congress is confronted with a confounding moral crisis: how do we house thousands of displaced people and continue this war in Iraq?

The South Will Rise Again! But for Whom?

From Day One of the Hurricane’s aftermath most people, even those outside the Gulf, knew something was wrong and that this political tornado is twisting at a frightful speed.

The Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, conceded to a CNN reporter: “If we can spend money on a war over there, why can’t we save the lives of citizens here?”

Thousands of African Americans, other people of color and working people who survived the disaster in New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf coast, lived somewhere between Iraq and a hard place before the storm hit.

Now, for the first time, maybe in decades, America looked into the faces of the “other America.” Black, brown, white and Asian tears shed salt on the streets and in the shelters of the Sugardome and Astrodome. These were the same people, as the media incessantly indicted, that didn’t leave the city. What they won’t say, of course, is these are the same people that were formerly enslaved, that built New Orleans; that historically sharecropped in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama; that changed hotel sheets of tourists on Bourbon Street; that served-up coffee and pastries to patrons in the French Quarter. What they won’t say, of course, is these are the people that cared for new born babies and disabled elderly.

These are the same people whose sons and daughters couldn’t get a job and joined the Army. This is the other America inflicted with severe and chronic disabilities: mental health disorders, addictions, hepatitis C, heart conditions, obesity, diabetes and AIDS – possessing no national health insurance plan. This is the other America ignored and neglected by politicians and corporate CEOs, that has been perpetually impoverished, confined to jails and prisons, and homeless long before the flood waters rose.

This is the other America indebted to credit card companies; living in rest homes and public housing; on the brink of small business bankruptcies and mortgage defaults. This is the other America denied equal rights, unemployed and socially isolated. This is the other America that can’t purchase property or own a car. And this is the other America dispossessed and desperately dying. This is the real America, indignant, proud and resilient for all that it’s worth. This is an America unseen and unheard for centuries which is what they won’t say.

History Will Not Absolve Us in Dixieland

The weight of history also breached the leeves in New Orleans. Between 1880 and World War I, African Americans were terrorized by racist lynchings in the South by mobs of whites who periodically invaded Black neighborhoods like New Orleans’ lower ninth ward. At least four dozen major incidents occurred between 1900 and World War II, accelerating Black labor migration from the South to the North. In the 50s’ and 60s’ the immense tide of opposition to civil rights grew intensely as Black churches burned and Jim Crow dug deep in the groundwater of parishes in New Orleans, Biloxi and Mobile.

Mass immigration, also, from Asia and Latin America dramatically reshaped the urban conflicts in the new South, adding a complex spin on race, class and migration in Dixieland. Langston Hughes, a son of the South and Midwest, penned in his groundbreaking poem, Impasse: “I could tell you, if I wanted to, what makes me what I am. But I don’t really want to – and you don’t give a damn.” In today’s New Orleans, for example, Louisiana’s largest city, 30% of the population lived below the federal poverty line and 67% of the city is African-American.

Half of the population are renters (like San Francisco) and the median value of homes occupied by owners is only $87,000. More than one-third of population has no health insurance and Black youthful unemployment rates reached 30% to 40%. Latinos, the nation’s largest ethnic group, didn’t escape the hit of Hurricane Katrina either. The 2000 U.S. Census estimated that the New Orleans area had a Latino population of over 25,000 but consulate officials based in Houston and New Orleans said the actual figures are much higher. They estimate that 70,000 to 100,000 Honduras and Mexicans lived in New Orleans. On Sunday, in Mexico City, Mexicans in catholic churches observed a moment of silence for the victims of Hurricane Katrina and for the four Mexican immigrants from the state of Chiapas who perished in the floods.

Conclusion

It will be up to poor people’s organizing movements – (as it’s always been) – to hook up with national political efforts to stop the war in Iraq; to align with African Americans and demand full reparations for centuries of enslavement and devastation; and to solidify social struggles ending poverty, racism and unemployment in America. Ultimately, these forces could prevail over any and all economic and political storms facing the poor and working people in the United States. Their combined strength will determine if a rebuilt New Orleans in Louisiana or Biloxi in Mississippi (and even parts of Mobile, Alabama) – or in entire sections of impoverished America -- welcomes back, houses and employs the people of the Gulf coast dispersed in a sheltered diaspora throughout the country.

Will this brief interval of momentary generosity hold, or will the ferocious historical narrative of a painful southern life remain re-written in drowning blood for thousands?