This article originally provided by Sunday Gazette-Mail

September 11, 2005

Word for word: Was race a factor in the Katrina debacle?

Racism hard to see, but it’s there

By Susanna Rodell
Editorial Page Editor

It's not simple. It never is.

When Jesse Jackson started talking about racism in the tardy response to the plight of New Orleans residents after Katrina hit, he got some virulent reactions from the conservative talk-radio types. How dare he accuse American government bodies of neglecting the hurricane’s mostly black victims?

Neither side is really right. Racism is much more slippery than that.

Most of the people in that sad city who got stuck were immobilized by poverty, not by their race. They didn’t have cars. They lived in the lower wards where the flooding was worst.

But it’s a fact that, as in many cities, and much to most Americans’ not-surprise, the poor people just happen to be black.

A city full of stranded black people didn’t get the help it needed. And the authorities in Washington, from the president on down, are outraged that they’re being accused of not caring because those people were black.

They are, in fact, being honest. They say their torpor wasn’t the result of racism. What they mean, when they say this, is that their internal voice, on looking at flooded New Orleans, was not: “Oh, they’re all black people. Therefore I don’t care.”

As I said, racism is much more slippery than that.

Indifference is not a loud emotion. It is a lack of emotion, in fact. It’s processed quietly. You look at someone suffering, and you either identify with the person, or you don’t. What tips us over into identifying — seeing that person as a stand-in for our own precious selves — is a complex set of finely tuned reactions that many of us don’t even process consciously.

I suspect that if George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld saw TV footage of Colin Powell and Condi Rice trapped in a sea of sewage, they’d be stirred to act. So it’s not simply a matter of race.

And looking at the thousands of poor black people, few TV viewers said to themselves, “Oh, poor and black — not like me, therefore not important.” Not consciously, anyway.

But subconsciously — below their own radar, never consciously acknowledged — you bet that’s what they said. They said it to themselves before they could even think about it. Then the images kicked in with all the supposed violence and looting, the same few seconds played over and over, just to help that reaction along.

But West Virginians also know that institutional neglect and indifference doesn’t necessarily discriminate. There are plenty of poor people here who are not black and who don’t necessarily elicit a lot of sympathy from their more prosperous neighbors.

What if Katrina had struck Manhattan? Cambridge, Mass.? Would the president have sat back and allowed local, state and federal agencies to wrangle over who was going to do what? I’m skeptical. On the other hand, if the storm’s target had been some city a little to the west in Texas, where the residents were poor and mostly Latino, the reaction would probably have been similar.

The fact that some members of these minorities have made it into the plutocracy does not erase racism from our minds or our society. Put a lot of them together in poor neighborhoods, and they stay unnoticed until we’re forced to look.

There’s good news here, though. Americans are looking now. They have coughed up millions in a matter of days, have offered to open their homes, have rallied and are mad as hell that it took so long for the people who were supposed to be in charge to act.

Some kind of national conscience has been stirred, breaking through the easy indifference. People are at least talking about race and poverty again.

It’s complicated — but it’s important. Let’s keep talking.

Rodell is editorial page editor of the Gazette. She can be reached at srodell@wvgazette.com.