Does America care about black and poor people? That's the question I pose on the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The mainstream media narrative proclaims New Orleans is rising from the waters of despair and making a comeback, bigger and better than before. The New Orleans Saints won the Superbowl, all is right in The Big Easy. Nothing to see here, move along.
Well, that's the wrong narrative.
Five years later, New Orleans is still drowning for the black and poor folks who cannot return to New Orleans.
Malik Rahms the director of Common Ground says;
"They don't want no poor n*****s back in - that's the bottom line."
Poor blacks can't come back because
they have no homes to come back too.
People have not returned because the projects they were living in were knocked down. People didn't return because there are no jobs. People didn't return because [their] rents have quadrupled. Other people have not returned because they've found a higher standard of living in Houston, San Antonio, and Atlanta. We have people laying it out in the film more eloquently than I can. They have better-paying jobs in their new cities; the education systems are better. Those are the main reasons why people have not returned.
Poor black people haven't returned because
they have no schoolsThere is an old saying: A white man’s heaven is a Black man’s hell. Arne Duncan, the U.S. secretary of education and President Obama’s basketball buddy, is one of those white men – a disaster capitalist who sees a silver lining in the Katrina catastrophe that swept away much of Black New Orleans, four and a half years ago. Duncan’s ghoulish statement, that “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina,” is identical to the sentiments expressed by racist Louisiana whites and the Bush Administration, when they gushed unashamedly over the opportunities Katrina created to build a new order in the city, even as bloated Black bodies still floated in the streets.
Poor black people haven't returned because
it's not safe;
In the chaos of Hurricane Katrina, thousands were left with little protection. And as the flood waters rose, many were left to grab on to each other to survive. Watch The Untold Race War during Hurricane Katrina.
In that desperate time, according to court documents, Roland Bourgeois grabbed a shotgun.
The 47-year-old man pleaded not guilty in a Louisiana federal courtroom Thursday afternoon to charges that he shot at three black men and issued an ominous warning that "anything coming up this street darker than a brown paper bag is getting shot."
It is time to heed the lessons of Katrina. We are one country and all of our citizens are important, rich and poor, black and white. When a government gives an every man for himself attitude towards disease and natural disasters, it reflects badly on our country. It is the duty of our country to, not only protect its citizens against terrorist attacks, but against natural disasters and diseases as well. If America is serious about being the world’s police man, they should also think about being the world’s fireman too. The money that was supposed to be used to fix the levees in New Orleans was used to drop bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine if our tax payer money was used for disaster relief rather than to create more disasters.
The lessons of Hurricane Katrina is that a military cannot save its people from disasters if they are only trained to kill. America has not been invaded in 300 years yet we invest more money into our military than we do anything else. Rather than being a destroyer, American needs to be a savior, of both its own people and its fellow citizens of the world.
This is what I wrote on the fourth anniversary of Katrina;
It's not about a Hurricane, it's about America. Three years after Katrina, much of the lower ninth ward is still in ruins. Three years after Katrina 40% of the displaced citizens still can't return home. Trouble the Water is a film that is about to be released about Katrina and the failure of our government to help it's citizens. It's not about flooded school buses. It's not about people not evacuating. It's not about Ray Nagin and "Chocolate City", it's about America.
Here is what I wrote
August 31, 2008 about the aftermath of Katrina;
Here is a sample of what New Orleans looks like three years later.
36. Percent fewer tons of cargo that move through Port of New Orleans since Katrina.
38. Percent fewer hospital beds in New Orleans since Katrina.
40. Percentage fewer special education students attending publicly funded, privately run charter schools than traditional public schools.
41. Number of publicly funded, privately run public charter schools in New Orleans out of total of 79 public schools in the city.
43. Percentage of child care available in New Orleans compared to before Katrina.
46. Percentage increase in rents in New Orleans since Katrina.
56. Percentage fewer inpatient psychiatric beds compared to before Katrina.
Fast forward five years later the lower ninth ward is still being asked to pull itself up by it's bootstrap and thousands of poor black Americas want to return home but can't.
The American media was all in a tizzy when former Mayor Ray Nagin said
New Orleans would be Chocolate City again and when
Kanye West said
"George Bush doesn't care about black people". They twisted it as examples of so called black racism (Shirley Sherrod) to distract from the FACT the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina displaced (for lack of a better word) poor black people out of New Orleans and
made the political landscape whiter. People got wrapped up in who was telling the truth and ignored the truth.
Five years later it's still
not about a Hurricane.
