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.