"In My Next Life, I Want to be a Black Woman"

Number one on my list of things I never thought I would hear at work is: "In my next life, I want to be a black woman." But there it was. I was chatting with a fellow attorney who is quite senior to me and he, overwhelmed by my sparkling and witty conversation, told me that in his next life he wanted to be a black woman. In this life, he is a Korean-American man. He told me he would like to have sooooul, to be able to say "Chil'" (I did not say "Chil'") and "mmmmhmmm" with feeling and pizazz. I thought to myself that who he actually wanted to be was Nell Carter.

Such is life in the workplace. My fellow female attorneys, particularly those who are young, are often mistaken for secretaries, although one wears a full suit and prada shoes almost everyday. I received an email sent to the three black female attorneys in my department that started like this: "One of you worked with me on this deal, but I have forgotten who....Could you please identify yourself?" Someone pointed out to the sender how his email came across and he apologized profusely.

When I worked in a department with another black woman who was my age, people would constantly mix us up: asking me how my vacation had been when I had clearly been in the office everyday, insisting that I had the documents from a certain deal that she had been on, and once, her secretary called me with information meant for her. Life in the "real world" is sometimes a strange confluence of invisibility and total visibility that can only be described as inescapable otherness.

I'm a Proud (sponsor) Mom!

A few weeks before Katrina, I was wrapped up in an article in the New York Times about the food emergency in Niger. Pictures and stories of babies dying of malnutrition, and of women, at the edge of starvation themselves, walking 13 miles barefoot to get to a camp where their children may be able to obtain life-sustaining sustenance gripped me. For some reason, that article got me restless. Similar to the uneasy restlessness I felt the day after Christmas when the tsunami swept across parts of Asia and Africa, I wanted to do something to be of assistance. Then I saw the “How you can help” link at the bottom of the page. I clicked on it and there the NYT provided a list of not-for-profit organizations that were providing help to the hungry in Niger. I chose World Vision because I remembered the board up in Daisy Bates’ mom’s kitchen where a virtual United Nations of the World Vision children that they sponsored were proudly displayed along with pictures and drawings that their sponsor children had sent to them. World Vision is a Christian organization that focuses on the physical needs of the communities they serve: food, water, clothing, education, health care and shelter.

Clicking on the World Vision site opens up a world of guilt-free online shopping. I don’t know about you, but I LUV online shopping. Sitting at my desk, I often engage in retail therapy to brighten up a dull day. With World Vision, I got all of the fun of shopping - bright and pictures, new products and the endless possibilities that newness brings - and none of the guilt. Besides sponsoring a child, you can browse through an entire world of shopping delight. Want to give a man a fish? Buy emergency food aid for places like Niger. Want to teach a man to fish? Buy some farm kits of seeds and tools or water kits for potable water. Besides simple sustenance, you can buy school supplies, immunizations, clothes, everything we have and never think about. And it’s a wonderful feeling! Most of the gifts you buy will be multiplied due to matching grants, so instead of buying two seed kits, you’ve actually provided fourteen! It’s the joy of compounding. Honestly, the thrill may leave you breathless.

Then there are the children. You can choose from which country you’d like to sponsor a child and whether you’d like a boy or a girl. Then you can sort of browse. All the children are compelling, so it’s hard to settle on one. I choose a four year-old Haitian girl who I’ll call “Lily” to protect her confidentiality. Lily is DARLING. Her mother put her hair up in one ponytail that sticks straight up and looks like a sideways unicorn horn. Darling, I tell you. When I got my picture of Lily to put up on my refrigerator door, I felt as though I had enlarged my family and I wanted to tell anyone who would listen about her, show them her picture and encourage them to get a sponsor child of their own.

Lily lives in a small village in Haiti that has been decimated by HIV. While Lily and her parents are healthy now, World Vision (and my sponsorship dollars) are working to secure health care and public health education in Lily’s village. Lily is what World Vision calls a Hope Child. Hope Children live in areas that have been struck by HIV. World Vision works in a community effort to stem the tide of the epidemic. Hope Children are a little more expensive, at $35 instead of $30 a month. However, I’ve seen someone die of AIDS and if my little $5 a month extra can save a life or ease a patient’s suffering, I’ll gladly pass up a frappuccino to help. Can I afford $35 a month? Considering that it is usual to spend $20 on dinner for one night, I say that I can. I support people spending their hard-earned money on things they enjoy, but I also strongly believe in setting some aside so that your blessing can be a blessing to others.

Lily enjoys playing with dolls and I have been told my World Vision that I can send her stickers (you can’t send anything that wouldn’t fit in a flat 6” x 9” envelope for fear of theft). I am going to find the most fabulous, shiniest, puffiest and fuzziest stickers to send to her. I may also be able to send her barrettes for her unicorn pigtail.

Is World Vision reputable? Well, they have been in operation since 1950 and have consistently received the highest rating of five stars for financial efficiency from Charity Navigator. But for me, it was enough of an endorsement that Daisy Bates’ parents have been sponsoring children through them for years.

Other questions: what difference can I make with one little sponsor child? I certainly won’t stop the spread of HIV or wipe hunger and instability off the face of the Haitian republic. Yet, I am reminded of the starfish story Daisy Bates told me:

A man and his son were walking down the beach one evening when the tide had washed a multitude of starfish to the shore. The little boy started bending down, picking up the starfish one by one and throwing them back in the ocean. His father asked him what he hoped to accomplish by throwing a few starfish back into the ocean. He couldn’t possibly save them all, so what difference did it make? The boy held up one starfish and replied to his father, “It makes a difference to this one,” and threw it in.

By sponsoring a child and buying a few seed kits or emergency food, I can’t hope to save an entire continent or an entire country, but I am a starfish collector. Who loves to shop online.

YG&B's Last Katrina Post (for now)

You know what? I thought I was an American. I mean, you know, I believed it. I said to myself, "Look, I don't know about these other people. They want to be all afro-centric, never having been to Africa. They want to be separate. They reject America. But not me, I love it. And I've done everything right. I went to the right schools; I have a host of friends from various ethnicities; I am a productive part of the economy; I am a true American." On the Fourth of July I wear red, white & blue and watch fireworks. I adore the Constitution. I think every person with the last name "Marshall" should at least make a go of being a judge. I know every word of every verse of just about every patriotic song ever written. I go to foreign countries and I don't shy away from being an American; I am proud of it. I say, "Yeah, I'm an American. Your country isn't perfect either. What you got? Bring it on."

And I thought all of this was enough. My naivete did not get washed away in Katrina's floodwaters, it died of dehydration in the Superdome; it succumbed to heat and exposure on the roof of a flooded house; it expired quietly on the sidewalk in a wheelchair while waiting for a medical evacuation. A friend pointed out to me that the scenes of hundreds of black people with nothing but the clothes on their backs milling around looking lost and bedraggled and being sent to various regions of the country reminded her of another scene she had often seen in documentaries showing scenes of recently emancipated slaves walking along dirt roads in the South, trying to locate relatives, trying to figure out where and how to begin again. She went on to tell me that the sight of the New Orleans’ Superdome, where people were crowded together in dark, damp spaces, hungry and thirsty, lying next to the dead, watching others commit suicide, living in the slick muck and rancid smell of human feces, thinking they had been sent there to die reminded her of tales of the dark Middle Passage when men and women cramped in the bottom of slave ships lived through similar circumstances as they crossed the ocean. Her observations surprised me, but I was not angry. The federal and state government response to Katrina has left me gutted. I'm all out of outrage. I am bereft of furor. I am just hollow and disillusioned.

I remember feeling this way when I first read the reports generated by a non-profit organization's housing testers who I represented in a fair housing action. Housing testers are volunteers who are trained to inquire about the availability of rental or for sale property in a given area. Usually the testers are paired in sets of black and white (for tests that are trying to ascertain whether or not there is racial discrimination in the dissemination of information on buying or renting real estate). The testers are given the same or very similar set of criteria for housing. They are given similar profiles to adopt for purposes of the test. For several agencies, the white testers were always shown available rental housing and received follow-up phone calls about the housing and the black testers, with similar criteria and incomes (sometimes higher incomes) were never shown rental housing. The black testers were always told that nothing was available and that the agent would call them if something came up. They never received the promised calls.

I was particularly galled by the tests because it meant that someone like me, well educated, well paid and black would never be shown an apartment in the testing area. I could never move there. My family could never take advantage of the lovely parks, the great schools or the other conveniences of the neighborhood. And I had worked so hard, but never being able to work myself white would cut me off from the benefits and privileges of Whiteville. For blacks who are not rich enough to purchase the million dollar homes in neighborhoods where the only color is green, the racism of that part of middle class white America confined them to economically distressed neighborhoods and their concomitant disadvantages.

Then there comes a flood. It is in the times when we must choose to sacrifice that we learn who we are and what is important to us. The response of the various levels of government to the Gulf Coast tragedy reminded me of a line from the poem “For My People” by Margaret Walker: "in memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood."

But then there were others, journalists, bloggers, and other ordinary citizens, who seeing the promise of America float belly up in the streets of Jefferson Parish, huddle under rain soaked highways and wander dazed through waist-high water, responded, “No, not on my watch.” And those citizens of all backgrounds dug in their closets and their wallets; they got in their cars and rented trucks; they took time off work to head down to the Gulf Coast. By doing so, they acted out the best of the American creed and shamed a flailing federal government. The government tends to follow the people where they lead; may the government learn who it is by seeing who we are.

Survivor's Report from New Orleans

I received this email from a friend who knows someone who survived both Katrina and the Astrodome. Below is her story. Her testimony helps us all to understand what appeared to be the survivors' inexplicable behavior in New Orleans:

"i heard from my aunt last night that my cousin Denise made it out of New Orleans; she's at her brother's in Baton Rouge. [this is] from what she told me:

her mother, a licensed practical nurse, was called in to work on Sunday night at Memorial Hospital (historically known as Baptist Hospital to those of us from N.O.). Denise decided to stay with her mother, her niece and grandniece (who is 2 years old); she figured they'd be safe at the hospital. they went to Baptist, and had to wait hours to be assigned a room to sleep in; after they were finally assigned a room, two white nurses suddenly arrived after the cut-off time (time to be assigned a room), and Denise and her family were booted out; their room was given up to the new nurses. Denise was furious, and rather than stay at Baptist, decided to walk home (several blocks away) to ride out the storm at her mother's apartment. her mother stayed at the hospital.

she described it as the scariest time in her life. 3 of the rooms in the apartment (there are only 4) caved in. ceilings caved in, walls caved in. she huddled under a mattress in the hall. she thought she would die from either the storm or a heart attack. after the storm passed, she went back to Baptist to seek shelter (this was Monday). it was also scary at Baptist; the electricity was out, they were running on generators, there was no air conditioning. Tuesday the levees broke, and water began rising. they moved patients upstairs, saw boats pass by on what used to be streets. they were told that they would be evacuated, that buses were coming. then they were told they would have to walk to the nearest intersection, Napoleon and S. Claiborne, to await the buses. they waded out in hip-deep water, only to stand at the intersection, on the neutral ground (what y'all call the median) for 3 1/2 hours.

the buses came and took them to the Ernest Morial Convention Center. (yes, the convention center you've all seen on TV.) Denise said she thought she was in hell. they were there for 2 days, with no water, no food. no shelter. Denise, her mother (63 years old), her niece (21 years old), and 2-year-old grandniece. when they arrived, there were already thousands of people there. they were told that buses were coming. police drove by, windows rolled up, thumbs up signs. national guard trucks rolled by, completely empty, soldiers with guns cocked and aimed at them. nobody stopped to drop off water. a helicopter dropped a load of water, but all the bottles exploded on impact due to the height of the helicopter. the first day (Wednesday) 4 people died next to her. the second day (Thursday) 6 people died next to her.

Denise told me the people around her all thought they had been sent there to die. again, nobody stopped. the only buses that came were full; they dropped off more and more people, but nobody was being picked up and taken away. they found out that those being dropped off had been rescued from rooftops and attics; they got off the buses delirious from lack of water and food. completely dehydrated. the crowd tried to keep them all in one area; Denise said the new arrivals had mostly lost their minds. they had gone crazy.

inside the convention center, the place was one huge bathroom. in order to shit, you had to stand in other people's shit. the floors were black and slick with shit. most people stayed outside because the smell was so bad. but outside wasn't much better: between the heat, the humidity, the lack of water, the old and very young dying from dehydration... and there was no place to lay down, not even room on the sidewalk. they slept outside Wednesday night, under an overpass. Denise said yes, there were young men with guns there. but they organized the crowd. they went to Canal Street and "looted," and brought back food and water for the old people and the babies, because nobody had eaten in days. when the police rolled down windows and yelled out "the buses are coming," the young men with guns organized the crowd in order: old people in front, women and children next, men in the back. just so that when the buses came, there would be priorities of who got out first. Denise said the fights she saw between the young men with guns were fist fights. she saw them put their guns down and fight rather than shoot up the crowd. but she said that there were a handful of people shot in the convention center; their bodies were left inside, along with other dead babies and old people.

Denise said the people thought there were being sent there to die. lots of people being dropped off, nobody being picked up. cops passing by, speeding off. national guard rolling by with guns aimed at them. and yes, a few men shot at the police, because at a certain point all the people thought the cops were coming to hurt them, to kill them all. she saw a young man who had stolen a car speed past, cops in pursuit; he crashed the car, got out and ran, and the cops shot him in the back. in front of the whole crowd. she saw many groups of people decide that they were going to walk across the bridge to the west bank, and those same groups would return, saying that they were met at the top of the bridge by armed police ordering them to turn around, that they weren't allowed to leave. so they all believed they were sent there to die.

Denise's niece found a pay phone, and kept trying to call her mother's boyfriend in Baton Rouge, and finally got through and told him where they were. the boyfriend, and Denise's brother, drove down from Baton Rouge and came and got them. they had to bribe a few cops, and talk a few into letting them into the city ("come on, man, my 2-year-old niece is at the Convention Center!"), then they took back roads to get to them. after arriving at my other cousin's apartment in Baton Rouge, they saw the images on TV, and couldn't believe how the media was portraying the people of New Orleans. she kept repeating to me on the phone last night: make sure you tell everybody that they left us there to die. nobody came. those young men with guns were protecting us. if it wasn't for them, we wouldn't have had the little water and food they had found.

that's Denise Moore's story."

YG&B's Conclusions on the Looting

I have been doing some thinking about the looting and chaos in New Orleans. After consulting with others, I have come to the following conclusions.

The first is that Hurricane Katrina is the first time we have seen a natural disaster of this magnitude hit a densely populated urban area since the San Francisco earthquake of nearly a century ago in 1906. The Great Midwestern Flood of 1993, Hurricanes Camille and Andrew and the Northridge earthquake of 1994 hit places that were less densely populated and/or more economically affluent than New Orleans. And New Orleans for all of its old-time opulence is broke. In 2003, the Orleans parish of New Orleans had a 34% poverty rate. St. Bernard’s parish, also in New Orleans, had a poverty rate of 17%. In Louisiana, almost 30% of people under 18 live in poverty. The devastation of Katrina hit a population in the worst possible condition to deal with it. Even still, one million people evacuated. Those who had transportation, a place to go, or money for a hotel got out of the city. The others, the poor, ill and addicted stayed behind, all 136,000 of them. My first point is that Katrina is a matter of first impression for us. It is inaccurate to compare the reactions of these victims with the reactions of other victims of different disasters.

The second realization came while watching news footage of people making off with items that were obviously not basic necessities. I could not, and I hope the troops with their shoot-to-kill orders will not, find fault with people who are taking food and other necessities from stores. The inventory is all covered by the owners’ insurance policies and it will only rot or rust in the hot wet New Orleans weather. There are other people though, who are taking more clothes than they can carry, jewelry, electronics (in a city without electricity) and other items that even on a dry day can only be considered luxury goods. Then I took another look at the mostly young people dragging their hauls, and I thought to myself, “Wait a second. I know those kids. I’ve seen those kids before!” Of course I didn’t know them personally, but it dawned on me that this was not the first time that many of these youngsters had stolen. Katrina’s aftermath had not brought out the worst in them. The guys that were looting yesterday had been stealing last month, long before the hurricane! Those who hadn’t stolen before probably wanted to steal, but the bounds of civil society and the threat of jail held them back. With the breakdown of civil society, they were able to steal to their heart’s delight. And what optimism: to be able to look past the squalor and hopelessness of the moment and see a day where you will be walking down a bright, dry street in your fine newly-looted clothes after selling six of ten DVD players you stole during Katrina with a big bright smile on your face. Who says the human spirit isn’t indomitable? But all jokes aside, the second point is that black people and poor people are not innately morally bankrupt. Those who would steal have looted. Those would not, have not.

The final conclusion I reached with the help of Daisy Bates (my friend, the original one has passed). How does one explain the people who sniper shot at hospital workers and shot at rescue helicopters? I am willing to go out on a limb and say those people also exist in any population; they are mentally unstable. Immense stress, readily available firearms (the looted gun shops) and the absence of medication lost in the flood combined to make people who were already mentally unstable a danger to themselves and to others. Once again, the point is that black people and poor people are not inherently given to malfeasance. Had there been some organization, some order, some plan, most if not all of the violence could have been avoided.

These conclusions are not meant to excuse criminal behavior. I only wanted to provide some sort of explanation that will jolt the nation and the federal government out of its disgust at the consequences of bad planning and slow reactions and move us along toward seeing this as one of the biggest challenges we are going to have to face as a nation. We have approximately 30,000 citizens without homes, jobs or any real financial support. And oh yes, they’re black. How we react will speak volumes about our values as a nation. What will we do?