Leonce Gaiter: Katrina's Deck Full of Race Cards

Katrina's Deck Full of Race Cards

07/09/05 07:55

The first days were the most telling. Nobody mentioned it. Tens of thousands of people trapped in increasingly filthy conditions—free-flowing feces, dead bodies lying about, grounds soaked in urine—yet nobody mentioned that they were all black. It was obvious to anyone with eyes. The images made you squirm and cringe—hordes of black faces pleading for help—life, food, water—in a major American city. Yet nobody mentioned it. What were they afraid of? Were they scared that the right-wingers would accuse them of playing the race card? Accuse them of suggesting that America had not achieved the colorblind state of utopian bliss that they insist it has; that white people and the American society over which they hold sway are not as perfectly just as they claim?

Even members of the congressional black caucus refused to “play the race card.” They focused on “class.” The fact that all the people of this particular class trapped in squalid hellholes filled with human waste happened to be black was oh, just… I don’t know… coinkydinky?

Like it or not America, hurricane Katrina blew a deck full of race cards in our faces. Let’s pick just a few of them up.

Ace of spades: Speaking on CNN, Wolf Blitzer clumsily, but correctly stated: so many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor and they are so black.” So black. These are not the gichy blacks—lighter skinned, with silkier hair—that long comprised New Orleans black middle and upper classes. These were the dark-skinned folk with nappy hair. Undeniably, thoroughly, discomfitingly black. New Orleans was a slave port. This quaint city, so charming, so southern, was the scene of crimes so base, viciousness so unadorned, it takes the breath away. Human chattel came through here. Women were taken, often raped by their white masters, and their lighter skinned children were accorded privileges above the common negroes. History lives. Racial history lives longer.

Queen of hearts: It just looked different when the cameras focus on white victims in Mississippi and when they focus on black ones in New Orleans. That will tell you how vibrantly, sensuously alive the subject of race remains in America. The white ones were picking up the pieces. The black ones carried the pieces in garbage bags slung over their shoulders. The white ones thought about rebuilding. The black ones had nothing on which to build. The coverage smacked of the local investigative report that uncovers a cruel puppy mill full of starved and diseased dogs. “Oh those poor black people.” Condescension threatened at every turn. It’s the same condescension with which we “open our hearts” to the victims of third world earthquakes, tsunamis and genocides. Condescension because we know that this could never happen to lighter-skinned, well-heeled folk. Such hell is reserved for “them”—the other—whomever they may be.

King of spades: My parents got out of New Orleans decades before Katrina, but for the same reasons that begat the tragedy. I lived there only briefly, but even as a child I knew that the attitude among the city’s poor, black population was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. My parents were 60s bourgeois strivers, and they insisted on three things: excellence to thwart the race hatred that threatened them, controlled rage to keep its memories fresh because more often than not, cultures die before they change, and finally arrogance in the knowledge that while the majority with all its power did its best to belittle us—they had failed.

Instead of this sustaining triumvirate, in New Orleans I saw hopelessness and resignation. There was about the people a sense that they would never get but crumbs from someone else’s plate. And to make this bitter pill palatable, they had only the Jesus that white people had thrust upon them hundreds of years ago with the express goal of making their ancestor’s enslavement less troublesome to maintain. Enslavement, Jim Crow, reeking prejudice, and then malignant neglect. Yes, history lives; and racial history lives longer.

Ace of Diamonds: Even conservatives are bashing Bush and his government’s and his personal response to this tragedy. Andrew Sullivan wrote:

Real conservatives believe that the state should do a few things that no one else can do – defense, decent public education, police, law and order among the most obvious – and leave the rest to individuals. Funding FEMA and having a superb civil defense are very much part of conservatism’s real core. It’s when government decides to reshape society, redistribute wealth, socially engineer, and take over functions that the private sector can do just as well that conservatives draw the line. The reason I’m mad as hell over Katrina is precisely because I’m a conservative and this kind of thing is exactly what government is for.


History lives. Modern conservatism was midwifed by resistance to the civil rights movement. Conservatives believed, as Sullivan states, that the government should not “socially engineer.” To many, that meant that if Mississippi wanted “whites only” bathrooms, it should have “whites only bathrooms.” For the government to interfere was “social engineering,”—not among its duties. However, if you’re willing to let someone rot and die quietly in poverty because of your ideological creed—die early from poor nutrition, poor and non-existent health care, then you’re willing to let them die in a flood. If poor people are dispensable under sunny skies, they’re dispensable in a storm. The right’s sudden concern over these peoples’ plight has nothing to do with their current living conditions. It has everything to do with conservative image management. A government controlled by white southerners oversaw a television spectacle that looked like an update from a slave ship. Their lies were exposed. Their attempt to quietly kill all mention of their society’s history of viciousness and race hatred and their part in it has failed. Overt paeans to segregation are no longer in vogue (except at select awards dinners for die-hards like Strom Thurman and Jesse Helms) but in promoting their creed of “hands off” government, conservatives deny history. They deny their willingness see the poor suffer and die under clear skies or cloudy. They deny racial history—their own racist history. And they do this because history smears dung on their vision of themselves, and America. But they’re learning the hard way that if we refuse to acknowledge the poisons in ourselves, in the culture, and address or “engineer” them, they fester. Soon there’s a riot, or a Superdome full of black people living amongst their own excrement with the whole world watching. And that’s what gets them now. It’s not the fact of the people suffering. They were perfectly happy to let poor black New Orleanians suffer in their ghettoed silence. It’s the fact of the world watching them suffer and tarnishing the image of the Last Empire.

The Joker: There he is, ladies and gentlemen. Grinning about sitting on Trent Lott’s porch once again. Telling us that he’ll give the situation more than one days’ attention. Gee, thanks, Your Highness. How big of him to walk amongst the common people, and even touch them, though some surely smelled bad. And Laura wore such a sensible suit. His Momma assures us that those Negroes holed up in Houston stadium are better off than they were at home. Yes, and the slaves were lucky to have been brought to the land of the free.

Bush didn’t dare go to the heart of New Orleans. So meone may have had the sense to spit.