(This is a comment that Radfem left in an earlier thread).
Racism, or classism have both been evident in many aspects of this tragedy. In fact, I think this will be the second great tragedy that we will remember aside from the human loss … that the whole world has seen the underpinnings of our under the table racist ways exposed. The use of the word “refugee” though has nothing to do with it.
My mom and I were discussing this yesterday, and she brought it up, in that way, which shouldn’t surprise me because she’s tutored kids, pregnant teens, young mothers(through a program that offers these services to young unwed mothers) and she’s seen the neglect of communities exacts a price every day that’s just a less extreme example of some of what happened in New Orleans, during Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans faced that for years before the hurricane that took it off the map.
I don’t know about the use of refugee, evacuee, survivor, etc. All of those terms are loaded in varying ways, and they may all impact people positively, or negatively based on life experiences, cultures, belief systems, personal Katrina experiences and those should be respected, which makes coming up with one acceptable label, more difficult.
With all the racism and classism seen so far, it puts everything under the microscope and maybe for good reason. Racism with “loot” vs “find”, racism with criminalizing large groups of Black people. Racism, ableism, and classism with the access to evacuating safely. The conditions in NO, that have been there for years, which contributed to what happened after Katrina. What was past becomes prologue.
Anyone who has to walk miles to refuge in their bare feet is a refugee. Anyone who has to take a shit in a once public sports arena, on the floor, next to dead bodies, is a refugee.
This is one vivid description of a refugee that has been given, but it also applies to many people in our nation who aren’t directly impacted by Hurricane Katrina, including those who lived in NO and in the South before the disaster.
Anyone who walks for miles in bare feet could be a homeless person, or family doing that, day after day, after day till there’s no break between where the calluses begin and the softer skin ends. We’ve all seen them, and smelled them, especially when they’ve been unable to bathe for a long time. Anyone urinating or defecating on what is, or once was a vibrant business, or a family’s house, goes on every day in many cities. At least where I live. Just last week, I walked down one of our streets and there was a flow of liquid coming towards my shoes and it was from a homeless guy lying in a doorway, who was going to the bathroom.
In downtown L.A., you have to hold your breath for about a minute each time you walk past an alley or a fire escape, because that’s where the “public” bathrooms are. Then people get arrested for urinating in public by police.
If these people from the hurricane are refugees in our society under some of these definitions, then they are not the only ones, just the most visible ones for the moment, until the media moves elsewhere. And some of them, might join the homeless in our country, because they lack the resources for a variety of reasons, or because they were homeless before.
I’m not trying to downplay the disaster, or make comparisons, but people in this country live in deplorable conditions on a daily basis. And while watching the coverage at New Orleans and other places, I was kind of reminded of that and that was one of many reasons why at the same time I felt compelled to watch the news coverage, it also made me want to turn away. Kind of like when I ran into the guy who was lying under the blanket under the doorway at City Hall, on the way to the office.
This disaster presented what can happen in a split second, to a large group of people all at once, rather than piecemeal and it stuck it in our faces, because while the media has no interest in the plight of the most poor people in our society, it’s always been fascinated by massive tragedy, death and damage. But the reality is, you can lose everything in a hurricane, or you can lose it when you live check to check and get sick, without health insurance. Women who are very poor and/or homeless are very vulnerable to rape as well in their lives as were the women and children in New Orleans.
Kirsten Anderberg made a similar point in her latest Indymedia piece, “The New Poor Versus The Old Poor.” As with Kirsten’s questions, I think the main answer to the disparity between the treatment of the recent displaced and the “everyday” displaced lies in the question of whether a situation is temporary or not. In a disaster, we can tell ourselves that the sufferers’ plight was not fated, “it could happen to anyone,” and most of all, it’s a transitory thing that can be successfully fixed once the clear and irrefutable cause (the hurricane, earthquake, etc.) is finished.
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/09/324089.shtml
In the case of the “everyday” sufferers: the homeless, the wounded sugar workers Anderberg talks about, the observer is looking at slow-motion causes that not only are much numerous and harder to pin down, but are more morally ambiguous to the viewer. Most of us don’t have a positive impression of the homeless. Most of us consume sugar and other imported goods that are part of the cash-crop system around the world;Whereas nobody but a maniac would openlysay, “hurricanes do great things,” plenty of people are logically ready to defend the systems that create –or aggrivate– the lives of the long-term homeless and the lives of laborers. Those systems frequently enrich us, or people like us.
If the would-be giver (and I’m not exempting myself from this syndrome, BTW) can tell herself that she only needs to offer temporary help, she’s more likely to invest the time and dollars. Tell her that it’s permanent, it never ends, it’s complicated, and you frequently won’t feel much sympathy for the sufferers– well, then it’s a different tale, isn’t it ?
Ironically, if we all did push ourselves to treat every day like the aftermath of Katrina, which it always is somewhere around the world, we’d be much more successful at whittling down these supposedly implacable problems.
BTW, radfem’s story in the other thread about the two homeless guys in the fight reminded me of something: I swung through the downtown bus mall last week on my way to my temp job. I went to an internet cafe to grab a coffee, and was chatting with the guy who fixed my drink. He commented that he used to feel bad about Portland’s homeless until he took the job on the bus mall, which is (logically) a major artery and stopover for homeless people. Now that he had to deal with dozens of them in the shop and on the street every day, his opinion was that “A lot of people are homeless because they’re just assholes.”
Leaving aside for a moment that years of scrabbling on the street might make any of us more inclined to behave like an asshole, I find myself reading radfem’s and Anderberg’s comments and thinking this: If we were serious about attacking these problems at the root, we’d have to treat every last sufferer like they were really and truly deserving of help. Or at least, we’d have to figure out that it’s in our best interests to do so. Even the assholes. Maybe especially them. :/
Thanks radfem and alsis both for being the only people so far who have noticed this.
A simple summary of the thinking of the majority might be that the folks in NO, etc. are victims of a hurricane – it’s not their fault – while the poor and homeless are lazy and it is their own fault that they are poor or homeless. It’s an attitude that I see far too often.
Right on!
I’ve read a lot of b.s. on the blogosphere from white people upset about “looting”, because of the photos of people leaving stores with T.V.s, electronics, or clothes…..but where are those same white people when the places being stolen from aren’t department stores, but the apartments or houses of poor, struggling people? You guessed it, blaming the victim again–“oh, they should just move” or “well, that’s what they get for trying to have something nice in that neighborhood” or “that’s just how ‘they’ are—it’s in the culture.” In other words, it’s perfectly ok for theft to take place in poor neighborhoods, from poor people—-that’s the way it’s “supposed” to be. A buffer zone, or to borrow from the U.S. energy strategy, a “neighborhood sacrifice zone” (instead of “National Sacrifice Zone”).
Radfem, I’m in your amen corner.
lightly, I think that a lot of people have noticed. But “class” is about the dirtiest word you can say out loud in America, so most people won’t say anything about it out loud;Unless someone else does it first. :/
Thanks, for the comments(and good to see you here lightly) but when I told the story to the city council, I didn’t even mention that the men were homeless. Because if I had done that, that body would never have gotten past, the homeless=criminal mindset to anything else. It would have been about, those damn homeless causing crime in our pristine downtown, rather than what had happened. So yeah, it seems that class is a fairly dirty word.
When a homeless person comes to sit in or speak at the meeting, the police officer’s eyes are on that person like a hawk. Every once in a while, my eyes will follow the cops, and he’ll stop doing it for a minute. No homeless person has ever disrupted or caused harm to anyone at a meeting, though police have ejected several, and arrested on on some M.C. nonsense. The Chief hates it when I watch what his men are doing and tries to head it off, by saying, “wasn’t that the guy who pulled the knife…” Nope, that guy was NOT homeless but you don’t see the non-homeless people being subjected to any scrutiny(except if there are more than two Black men standing together, which has been around since the slave codes, and when there’s a group of them to speak on a topic, SWAT is out in the parking lot or on the parking garage, somewhere.)
There’s some strife in our city when it comes to building homeless shelters. Even though the homeless are more downtown, all the shelters have to be located in the poorest neighborhood, which has predominantly Latino and Black residents. The people who propose the shelters and try to get funding love them, as long as they aren’t located near their homes.
The third facility, a day center of services, will be built near the other two…Why? Because residents of a mostly White middle-class neighborhood did not want it even ONE MILE from their homes. NIMBYism and all
Incidently, the publisher of the newspaper I work for, had a definition for refugee:
he wrote an excellent editorial on the crisis and its aftermath. Also, there are other columns from Earl Ofari Hutchinson and the president of the minority photo journalism institute. That column was beneath the pictures that were taken from Yahoo that were the center of controversy.
Lots of letters came in too. Some on the “refugee” term usuage, most of them on the response of FEMA, Bush, etc.