This article originally appeared
in TomDispatch.com,
a project of The Nation Institute. The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of
Hurricane Ivan looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond's version
of the Rapture. Affluent
white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and
car-less – mainly Black – were left behind in their below-sea-level
shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath.
New Orleans had spent decades preparing for inevitable submersion
by the storm surge of a class-five hurricane. Civil defense officials
conceded they had ten thousand body bags on hand to deal with the
worst-case scenario. But no one seemed to have bothered to devise
a plan to evacuate the city's poorest or most infirm residents.
The day before the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, New Orlean's daily,
the Times-Picayune, ran an alarming story about the "large
group…mostly concentrated in poorer neighborhoods" who wanted
to evacuate but couldn't.
Only at the last moment, with winds churning Lake Pontchartrain,
did Mayor Ray Nagin reluctantly open the Louisiana Superdome and
a few schools to desperate residents. He was reportedly worried
that lower-class refugees might damage or graffiti the Superdome.
In the event, Ivan the Terrible spared New Orleans, but official
callousness toward poor Black folk endures.
Over the last generation, City Hall and its
entourage of powerful developers have relentlessly attempted
to push the poorest segment
of the population – blamed for the city's high crime rates – across
the Mississippi river. Historic Black public-housing projects have
been razed to make room for upper-income townhouses and a Wal-Mart.
In other housing projects, residents are routinely evicted for
offenses as trivial as their children's curfew violations. The
ultimate goal seems to be a tourist theme-park New Orleans – one
big Garden District – with chronic poverty hidden away in bayous,
trailer parks and prisons outside the city limits.
But New Orleans isn't the only case-study in
what Nixonians once called "the politics of benign neglect." In Los Angeles,
county supervisors have just announced the closure of the trauma
center at Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital near Watts. The hospital,
located in the epicenter of LA's gang wars, is one of the nation's
busiest centers for the treatment of gunshot wounds. The loss of
its ER, according to paramedics, could "add as much as 30
minutes in transport time to other facilities."
The result, almost certainly, will be a spate of avoidable deaths.
But then again the victims will be Black or Brown and poor.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the 1964 Civil
Rights Act, the United States seems to have returned to degree
zero of moral concern
for the majority of descendants of slavery and segregation. Whether
the Black poor live or die seems to merit only haughty disinterest
and indifference. Indeed, in terms of the life-and-death issues
that matter most to African-Americans – structural unemployment,
race-based super-incarceration, police brutality, disappearing
affirmative action programs, and failing schools – the present
presidential election might as well be taking place in the 1920s.
But not all the blame can be assigned to the current occupant
of the former slave-owners' mansion at the end of Pennsylvania
Avenue. The mayor of New Orleans, for example, is a Black Democrat,
and Los Angeles County is a famously Democratic bastion. No, the
political invisibility of people of color is a strictly bipartisan
endeavor. On the Democratic side, it is the culmination of the
long crusade waged by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) to
exorcise the specter of the 1980s Rainbow Coalition.
The DLC, of course, has long yearned to bring white guys and fat
cats back to a Nixonized Democratic Party. Arguing that race had
fatally divided Democrats, the DLC has tried to bleach the Party
by marginalizing civil rights agendas and Black leadership. African-Americans,
it is cynically assumed, will remain loyal to the Democrats regardless
of the treasons committed against them. They are, in effect, hostages.
Thus the sordid spectacle – portrayed in Fahrenheit 9/11 – of
white Democratic senators refusing to raise a single hand in support
of the Black Congressional Caucus's courageous challenge to the
stolen election of November 2000.
The Kerry campaign, meanwhile, steers a straight
DLC course toward oblivion. No Democratic presidential candidate
since Eugene McCarthy's
run in 1968 has shown such patrician disdain for the Democrats'
most loyal and fundamental social base. While Condoleezza Rice
hovers, a tight-lipped and constant presence at Dubya's side, the
highest ranking, self-proclaimed "African American" in
the Kerry camp is Teresa Heinz ((born and raised in white-colonial
privilege).
This crude joke has been compounded by Kerry's
semi-suicidal reluctance to mobilize Black voters. As Rainbow
Coalition veterans like Ron
Waters have bitterly pointed out, Kerry has been absolutely churlish
about financing voter registration drives in African-American communities.
Ralph Nader – I fear – was cruelly accurate when he warned recently
that "the Democrats do not win when they do not have Jesse
Jackson and African Americans in the core of the campaign."
In truth, Kerry, the erstwhile war hero, is running away as hard
as he can from the sound of the cannons, whether in Iraq or in
America's equally ravaged inner cities. The urgent domestic issue,
of course, is unspeakable socio-economic inequality, newly deepened
by fiscal plunder and catastrophic plant closures. But inequality
still has a predominant color, or, rather, colors: black and brown.
Kerry's apathetic and uncharismatic attitude toward people of
color will not be repaired by last-minute speeches or campaign
staff appointments. Nor will it be compensated for by his super-ardent
efforts to woo Reagan Democrats and white males with war stories
from the ancient Mekong Delta.
A party that in every real and figurative sense refuses to shelter
the poor in a hurricane is unlikely to mobilize the moral passion
necessary to overthrow George Bush, the most hated man on earth.
Mike Davis is the author of Dead
Cities: And Other Tales as well as Ecology
of Fear and co-author of Under the Perfect Sun: the San
Diego Tourists Never See, among other books. |