September 02, 2005
Cleveland Indy Media Center
Original article is at http://cleveland.indymedia.org/news/2005/09/17024.php Print comments.
I was seriously hoping that I would not have to write this article. But it has
been too long now, and I have to say something. Regardless of whether the deaths
en masse of poor black folks in New Orleans is due to neglect or maliciousness,
the end result is constructively a genocide on poor blacks in America, right
now, in 2005. The lack of aid to New Orleans at this late hour (7 pm, Sept. 1)
is not explicable. I have only one explanation that I can muster up. And that
explanation is classism and racism.
The reality is these refugees in New Orleans right now were already poor, so
that tells you how much the government cared about them BEFORE this disaster.
Why would you expect the government to all of a sudden, now, prioritize the
group they did not care about before, to the tune of inadequate health care,
inadequate and expensive housing, etc.? So this is not a shock, I guess, that
the American government is apparently going to let poor black Americans die for
no apparent reason, right on the nightly news. They were already not caring
about the health of these people, so I guess they are still in that mindset.
Look, New Orleans is not on Mars. I cannot explain why military aircraft
carriers, the like we saw during the South Vietnamese evacuation in the Vietnam
War, are not landing in New Orleans and airlifting these folks out. Are they all
in Iraq or what? I also cannot explain why they are not, at the very least,
airdropping food and water onto the people in New Orleans, like they did in
Afghanistan after 9/11. These people are literally DYING because America is not
doing that! I cannot explain why they did not evacuate the New Orleans jail
until AFTER the disaster, either. The many, many ways that the American
government has now jeopardized the lives of poor black Americans in this Katrina
disaster has literally scared me to death, as a poor person. I feel very
strongly that if those were middle class white people stuck in those conditions
in New Orleans right now, that relief would have come days ago. For some reason,
just as the cops let L.A. burn in the Rodney King riots, this smells of racism
to me.
New Orleans is not even a day away from the West Coast. I cannot explain why it
is taking days to get help to those people dying down in New Orleans right now.
But I remember when I was in the Northridge Earthquake in 1994, that the white
middle class people had all the water they could use from the national guard,
while only a few miles to the south, the mostly Hispanic communities, were
standing in lines for hours in the sun to get only 5 gallons of water. My son
and I drove up from the San Fernando Valley into the Santa Clarita Valley in
1994 after the quake collapsed our apartment, after seeing block-long lines at
stores for water and long lines at high schools and parks with National Guard
trucks giving out water to anyone with a 5 gallon container. When we hit Santa
Clarita, there were cases of bottled water at every I-5 off ramp, with military
personnel just sitting there, waiting for these middle class families to drive
up. When I hit the Santa Clarita Red Cross, they also asked me to take some
water off their hands, unloading a few cases of Evian water into my trunk! They
had a surplus. I asked both the military and the Red Cross to please load the
water up and drive just a bit over the hill where the water was desperately
needed. And they refused. Maybe that story is a microcosm of what is going on
here in New Orleans right now. No one wants to drive over the hill with
supplies?
I cannot explain why there is not at least food and water for the people we are
seeing suffering in New Orleans, and the idea there is no landing strip is not
true. I have seen flat lawns with massive people littered on them, I have seen
abandoned highway strips that could sustain a landing, and I am sure if you told
the refugees if they move out of the area for the plane to land, they will be
airlifted out, they would cooperate right away!
I have watched insane police hold machine guns to the bodies of mothers carrying
clothing out of department stores on TV news. I saw the cops force the mothers
to drop the clothing, with his gun in her chest, and she dropped the clothing,
and it floated away. A pure authoritarian waste. Even Nazi-ish in nature! I saw
police allowing their own into stores for food, but holding the people back from
the same luxury, calling poor blacks desperate for food and water “looters”
while the cops do the same exact thing and are NOT called looters. I would
assume some cops are gonna die if they keep trying to act like this. I see
America fueling a heavy crisis in New Orleans, then blaming the refugees for
getting desperate. Just as it is in the Middle East, if people were fed by
American government, instead of patrolled and pointed at with guns while hungry,
things will be safer for all.
The racist cops of L.A. used the Rodney King riots to validate some kind of
weird racist theory that blacks are violent and riot. But that is bull. The
movie “Trading Places” with Eddie Murphy and Dan Akroyd is a beautiful movie
about this idea where you drive someone to desperation then call them criminals.
My friend was cleaning pools in Beverly Hills during the Rodney King riots and
she said there was a cop car on every block. But when she got into the lower
income areas, a cop could not be found. So, from my own disaster experiences, I
guess the class/caste separation of even disaster rescue in America is obvious
and dominant.
I just told my 21 year old son that he is watching a genocide of people in
America right now on TV, as this is what this feels like to me. I have heard NO
logical argument as to how on earth those people could still be stranded in New
Orleans. It is not Mars. This is ridiculous. And it has become obvious this
delayed response in New Orleans is fueled by classism and racism, unless the
U.S. government can spit out some logical explanation, but I have not heard one
yet. New Orleans is a scene of constructive genocide right now on America’s
poor blacks, and I do not know how Americans are just sitting quietly as they
watch this on TV. I am out of my mind about this right now. Just out of my
damned mind. I have never hated GW Bush more, and I have never seen a better
living example of classism and racism alive in America today. According to
resources in Canada, Canadian TV is reporting they offered planes full of food,
water, and supplies to help New Orleans refugees and America turned them down!
Again, I wish I did not have to write this article. And I hope I am wrong in
this conclusion. But again, I have waited days now for logical answers from the
U.S. government and it appears those answers are not coming!
kirstena@resist.ca - Seattle, Washington
http://www.kirstenanderberg.com
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