Katrina's racial storm
Thursday, September 8, 2005
Printable FormatChicago Tribune Editorial
The stories of suffering and loss have ricocheted inside Houston's Astrodome since its conversion to a temporary shelter for Hurricane Katrina evacuees. But one poverty-stricken woman's anguish struck U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) with an intense clarity. "We had nothing before the hurricane," she told Obama as he wandered through the crowd there on Labor Day. "Now we got less than nothing."
Back in Washington on Tuesday, Obama turned that lament into the theme of a Senate floor speech. It laid out a thoughtful and measured analysis of the initial stumbling response to the plight of flood victims in New Orleans, who were disproportionately black and poor.
It's understandable that frustration would bubble over among those stranded by the storm. What's inexcusable is the Monday morning quarterbacking from some pundits and critics quick to blame the problems on racism--and to suggest the rescue would have been swifter, and the suffering minimized, if the Louisiana Superdome had been filled with whites.
One of those is Rev. Jesse Jackson, who visited the New Orleans Convention Center where thousands had been stranded for days and declared, "This looks like the hull of a slave ship." Another was rap star Kanye West, who asserted that "George Bush doesn't care about black people" during an appearance on an NBC telethon for hurricane survivors.
The racism charge is simplistic and ridiculous. But it also could prove dangerous if it fosters the impression that government emergency plans aren't what's really in need of fixing.
In his speech, Obama didn't give federal bureaucrats a pass for what he described as "unconscionable ineptitude." But he also said it was an ineptitude that seemed colorblind. The problem, he said, wasn't racism but rather government's inability to appreciate how the chasm between the haves and have-nots grows even wider during a disaster.
Not everyone, he said, had the wherewithal to pack up an SUV and flee a monster storm. Bureaucrats blindly presumed they did, and that is a critical shortcoming that will have to be addressed in emergency planning from now on.
"That is the deeper shame of this past week," Obama said, "that it has taken a crisis like this one to awaken us to the great divide that continues to fester in our midst. That's what all Americans are truly ashamed about, and the fact that we're ashamed about it is a good sign. . . . [That shame] tells me that the American people have better instincts and a broader heart than our current politics would indicate."
What played out in New Orleans was more about economic class than race. The Senate's only African-American understands the distinction--and the need for the nation to address it with more than inflammatory rhetoric.