Three Displaced New Orleans Residents Discuss Race and Hurricane Katrina

Well there are is still no official toll of the numbers left dead by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. But as the Army Corps of Engineers began pumping the water out of the city earlier this week, officials estimated that the death the toll could be as many as 10,000 making it one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the country. More than 500,000 evacuees from Hurricane Katrina are being relocated to other states all across the country. It is a historic exodus and it is unclear what will happen to them and what support they will receive to try and rebuild their lives. An Associated Press analysis of Census data shows that the people living in the path of the hurricane's worst devastation were twice as likely as most Americans to be lower income and without a car. The dead and the displaced are largely the ones who had no where to go, and no means to get there. They were the ones who waited for days at the New Orleans Convention Center and at other places throughout the city, without adequate food, medicine, housing and security. And they were mostly black and largely poor.

New Orleans is a city that is almost 70 percent black with nearly 23 percent of its residents living in poverty. Many African Americans are asking if this calamity would have been allowed to happen if the demographics of the city were different. And they are asking if the response would have been quicker if New Orleans had been a predominately white, wealthy city. On his way to Louisiana a few days ago, Reverend Jesse Jackson said that racial discrimination and indifference to black suffering was at the root of the disaster response. He went on to say, "In this same city of New Orleans where slave ships landed, where the legacy of 246 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow discrimination, that legacy is unbroken today."

The Reverend Al Sharpton spoke in Houston on Saturday and noted the difference between the government's rapid response to the hurricane in Florida last year that hit mostly white upper-middle class areas and to Hurricane Katrina that hit the mostly black New Orleans and Mississippi.

* Rev. AL Sharpton, speaking in Houston, September 3, 2005.

Many in the hip-hop community have spoken out as well. On Friday night, hip-hop superstar, Kanye West appeared on a live NBC telethon and had this to say about the Bush administration's treatment of the mostly black victims of Hurricane Katrina.

* Kanye West, speaking on NBC News, "A Concert for Hurricane Relief."

After the program, fellow hip-hop star P. Diddy told the program Access Hollywood, "I think he spoke from his heart. He spoke what a lot of people feel." And on his Sunday program on radio network, Air America, hip-hop luminary Chuck D, formerly of the seminal rap group Public Enemy, read the lyrics to a new song about the Hurricane entitled, "Hell no, we ain't alright."

* Chuck D, rap artist.

Administration officials have been busy denying that the race of the victims of hurricane Katrina had anything to do with the slow government response. Bush appeared earlier this week with African-American conservative televangelist T.D. Jakes of Dallas and other local black leaders in an effort to counter this criticism. Last weekend the highest-ranking African-American in the Bush administration, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dismissed claims of racism. On the plane trip from Washington to her hometown of Mobile Alabama on Sunday, Rice said, "Nobody, especially the President, would have left people unattended on the basis of race." Later that day she had this to say.

* Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State, speaking in Bayou la Batre, LA.

Well when Democracy Now producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and John Hamilton reported from New Orleans this weekend they encountered some of the white locals attitudes about race.

* Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Democracy Now! producer who went to New Orleans over the weekend to cover the disaster.
* New Orleans locals

We turn to three residents of New Orleans who were forced to flee about who gets saved and who doesn't, and even the question: Will New Orleans be rebuilt?

* David Gladstone, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at University of New Orleans. He has recently completed a multi-year study of tourism and housing in the city of New Orleans, focusing on the neighborhoods closest to the French Quarter.
* Beverly Wright, founder and Director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University in New Orleans, LA.
* Curtis Muhammad, a veteran Student Non-Violent Cooordinating Committee organizer and co-founder of Community Labor United.

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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/07/1415225