Have you noticed yet how every op-ed that sets out to show that the "left behind" of New Orleans were not deserted because they were poor and black stops after showing it wasn't because they were black except by an accident of demographics?
Yes, those who could not get out of the city under their own steam were predominantly black but then again so was the city. More black people managed to evacuate from New Orleans than white people - purely because the city is two thirds african-american. The really crucial figure is that of car ownership: 35% of black residents of New Orleans do not own automobiles, while 15% of white residents do not. It would be ridiculous to suggest that people in New Orleans were unable to buy a car because they were black. It is not at all ridiculous to suggest that poverty (and New Orleans had twice the national average of its citizens living in poverty) prevented people, predominantly black but also white, from buying a car.
Crucially, and no matter who was supposed to be in charge, if you didn't have access to transport you were left behind. It didn't matter whether you were black, white or purple with pink polkadots but if you were too poor to have your own car then you were sunk. Literally.
There were, without a doubt, detailed plans made by Louisiana and the city of New Orleans to evacuate the poor without cars using city buses and other public vehicles. That plan was not enacted and for that failing the people in charge at State and City must be held accountable..
Yet last summer FEMA ran a hurricane planning scenario for the New Orleans area called "Hurricane Pam". Would FEMA have been able to save those poverty-stricken victims? No. They planned to leave them behind too:
Though officials involved in the scenario acknowledged that tens of thousands of residents would be without the means to evacuate New Orleans in the absence of government help, the Hurricane Pam scenario teams did not determine strategies for evacuating people ahead of time. Instead, officials predicted that only one-third of the city’s residents would make it out in time and designed their response plan around that assumption.
At the end of the assessment, FEMA Regional Director Ron Castleman announced, "We made great progress this week in our preparedness efforts."
...
It is apparent from the general action plan released after the Hurricane Pam exercise and interviews with the press at the time that over a year before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, local, state and federal agencies were aware of the challenges they would face if a storm flooded the city.
For instance, they anticipated that failure to completely evacuate the entire city ahead of the storm would pose deadly consequences for those left behind. They also predicted that tens of thousands of residents would not leave the city, even under a mandatory evacuation order, because they would lack transportation. And they foresaw that those who stayed and managed to survive the winds and the flooding would be without emergency relief for several days.
Brown said that even if the action plan played out perfectly, the government would not be able to respond to all of people’s needs in the event of a storm like the hypothetical Pam.
"Residents need to know they'll be on their own for several days in a situation like this," Brown said in a July 2004 interview with the New Orleans based Times-Picayune.
No-one, at any level of authority or from either political party, thought the poor of New Orleans were worth the effort and cost of evacuation using non-private resources. That is if they thought about it at all. Too often, the myth of the American Dream means that those not in abject poverty do their best to ignore those who are. The majority of Americans cannot or will not conceive of the conditions of those who either had no car, had nowhere to go, or no money to spend, or who were waiting for an end-of-month check.
Or if they think of the poor at all, they think of them as somehow an enemy - "if only the poorest people were to somehow disappear then they would no longer be a drain on my resources and I would be better off". Then, they delude themselves, it would be easier by far for me to climb the ladder and achieve the American Dream of wealth. It is a delusion because in America less than one percent of the population owns over 40 percent of the wealth. Excluding housing, this privileged elite owns close to 90 percent of the wealth—stocks, bonds and other financial assets, as well as commercial businesses. It is this class which controls both the Democratic and Republican parties and the government at every level—local, state and federal - and they consistently act only in their own self-interests. Minimal government, tax cuts, social security reform, private healthcare, restrictions on civil rights, the bankruptcy bill - the list goes on and on.
In the weeks and months to come, Americans should enter into at least one debate. They must ask themselves what the priorities of society are to be: the social interests of the many or the accumulation of personal wealth by the privileged few?
Solidarnosc.
Update Sept. 11th My words above about the "majority of Americans" were too strong and I apologise. As this poll by NPR shows, only 44% of Americans think a tax raise to aid the poverty stricken is a bad idea and only 48% of those polled thought poverty was because "people are not doing enough to help themselves out of poverty". Please substitute those figures mentally as you read the original text. Thank you.
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