Racism past, present: King, Obama, and the legacy of Katrina
Robert Zaller
Issue date: 2/8/08 Section: Ed-Op
The only candidate in the race to go near the subject was John Edwards, and the voters did not thank him for it. I cannot say how sincere Edwards, the millionaire squire and hedge fund legal consultant, really is about how the bottom 10th lives. It was a niche politically for someone who found the centrist position in the Democratic Party already occupied. But Edwards did do two things in his campaign that put down markers. He began it in New Orleans, and he ended it there.
New Orleans is the peeled-back truth about black America. It is, or was, a black city, i.e. one with an African American majority, as Miami, once a laid-back cracker abode, is now a Latino one. There are other such cities: Washington, Baltimore, Detroit, Newark. Some of them wear camouflage: Washington is, in the parlance, our nation's capitol, full of monuments and bureaucrats, the political seat of the world's superpower.
The reality of an impoverished black city that is the fact of life for most of its population does not comport with this image, so black Washington is culturally invisible except when it riots. It did so in the great insurgency of the late 1960s, along with Detroit and Newark. The story of major American cities ablaze has never been told as such; it has been embedded in larger narratives about the civil rights movements or the social disturbances of the '60s, and papered over historically by the canonization of Dr. King, whose gospel of nonviolence has given a patina of wistful nostalgia to the era: African Americans tearfully waving their handkerchiefs at Bobby Kennedy's funeral cortege, rather than the angry black activism of CORE, SNCC, and the Black Panthers.
Detroit and Newark never recovered from the riots, and parts of Washington's ghetto remained a charred wasteland for years. But they stayed black cities, simply because their residents had no place else to go. It was different in New Orleans.
Hurricane Katrina, the most predictable and under-prepared-for disaster in American history, swamped the city on Aug. 29, 2005. Most of its black population lived in areas below sea level. Nearly 2,000 were killed; 200,000 survivors were forced out. The city's population was nearly halved; its economy came to a halt; its government ceased to function. The Louisiana National Guard was deployed in Iraq.
New Orleans is the peeled-back truth about black America. It is, or was, a black city, i.e. one with an African American majority, as Miami, once a laid-back cracker abode, is now a Latino one. There are other such cities: Washington, Baltimore, Detroit, Newark. Some of them wear camouflage: Washington is, in the parlance, our nation's capitol, full of monuments and bureaucrats, the political seat of the world's superpower.
The reality of an impoverished black city that is the fact of life for most of its population does not comport with this image, so black Washington is culturally invisible except when it riots. It did so in the great insurgency of the late 1960s, along with Detroit and Newark. The story of major American cities ablaze has never been told as such; it has been embedded in larger narratives about the civil rights movements or the social disturbances of the '60s, and papered over historically by the canonization of Dr. King, whose gospel of nonviolence has given a patina of wistful nostalgia to the era: African Americans tearfully waving their handkerchiefs at Bobby Kennedy's funeral cortege, rather than the angry black activism of CORE, SNCC, and the Black Panthers.
Detroit and Newark never recovered from the riots, and parts of Washington's ghetto remained a charred wasteland for years. But they stayed black cities, simply because their residents had no place else to go. It was different in New Orleans.
Hurricane Katrina, the most predictable and under-prepared-for disaster in American history, swamped the city on Aug. 29, 2005. Most of its black population lived in areas below sea level. Nearly 2,000 were killed; 200,000 survivors were forced out. The city's population was nearly halved; its economy came to a halt; its government ceased to function. The Louisiana National Guard was deployed in Iraq.
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