Sucks to be poor (and black)
The media has a bad habit, maybe just subconsciously, of dehumanizing brown-skinned people. Hundreds of people can die in some African country and it might make page 25 of any Western newspaper. We see no footage of life in the Middle East that isn’t filled with violence or “crazy” arabs hollering in the streets to Allah while firing machine guns in the air. I’m not stupid enough to think that this doesn’t comprise some segment of their life, but the media is careful not to give us images that might garner sympathy for these people as they are bombed repeatedly and killed en-masse by so-called “friendly” troops.
In the days after Katrina we were bombarded with images of black people “looting”, and stories of rapes, killings, and uncontrolled violence taking place in the streets. This happens in all large-scale disasters, but is exacerbated in an area filled with hopelessness, poverty, and a criminal element, all of which flourished in NOLA long before the hurricane ever hit. Language such as “looters” and “refugees” was used to constantly remind us that these were bad people, not “desperate”, “panicked” or “hysterical” American “citizens”. Not people like us.
People talked about how stupid they were for staying, assuming they had a choice and forgetting that they were told to go to those places if they could not get out of the city. It had a subconscious effect of numbing sympathy for their plight, and whether we admit it or not, the US gov’t sat on its hands while they suffered. If this had been Malibu, or Palm Springs, or an affluent suburb of Connecticut, the response would have been quicker and much more robust. And if it hadn’t been, people like FEMA head Mike Brown would not have been offered the chance to resign and save what face they had left; they would have been fired on the spot.
The whole Katrina fiasco tells us more about class divisions than racial ones. Bush standing up and saying “I take responsibility” is just an empty attempt to win back his sliding poll numbers. Remember, just last week he walked up to Mike Brown and told him what a wonderful job he was doing. If that isn’t outrageous enough, the fact he handed this unqualified idiot one of the most important and critical jobs in the country speaks volumes about Bush and his own incompetence.
The bottom line is these people were for the most part extremely poor, they were mostly black, and as a result they were about as far off the Establishment’s radar as they could possibly be.