Fall 2007 Featured Story What Meaneth Black Suffering? Race, Meaning-Making, and Democracy in Post-Katrina America by Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou
A few months ago, while I was giving a tour of Lower Ninth Ward to a group of sociologists visiting New Orleans for a race, class, and gender conference, a dialogue incurred that revealed more in what was not said than what was said. One of my fellow tour guides, Abby Lublin, a New York City teacher who had spent a few months in New Orleans volunteering for the People’s Organizing Committee, referred to human catastrophe in New Orleans as “genocide.” The collection of distinguished female academics and I engaged in a lively debate. We concluded that the word “genocide” pointed us in the right direction, but was insufficient to describe what had happened on August 29, 2005. (In fact, the use of the word genocide in reference to New Orleans may cheapen what is happening in Darfur.) Post-Katrina New Orleans is shaped by a historical set of issues and by a present-day “unholy trinity” – of mass familial displacement, mass fiscal divestment, and mass physical devastation. After several months of living and working in New Orleans, I found lacking a discernable vision for the city and region – and am reminded of the question posed by W. E. B. DuBois a century ago: “What meaneth Black suffering?” Historically, black folk have had to contend with hegemonic forces denying them both the means to make ends meet and what I would describe as “meaning making”: the American empire alienated people of African descent from the possibility of making meaning for themselves. The genealogy of black folk in America is littered with examples of this kind of dizziness and absurdity. The images of folks stranded on rooftops and packed in the New Orleans Superdome are the latest and grossest of this history. By situating post-Katrina New Orleans within the existential context of black life in America, this tragedy does maintain some uniqueness. New Orleans is a phenomenon. It is the birthplace of jazz – America’s first original art form – and an extraordinary mix of cultures that is reflected in its food, architecture, skin tones, and social life. Yet it is also the site of her greatest disaster (both natural and human-made). In a word, New Orleans is tragicomic. Today, her plight has disappeared from much of the public memory. And, following a six-month tour in her bosom, I have found that the struggle to rebuild the great city is tainted with an overriding burden of hopelessness and misunderstanding. Our challenge today is to bring to bear an interdisciplinary analysis that affirms these historical realities: combining a nuanced vision of the present with an eye on a prophetic future.
Black suffering and American democracy Three recently-published books help point us in a direction of this kind of approach: After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina (The New Press, 2006); What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race and the State of the Nation (South End Press, 2007); and There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina (Routledge, 2006). While each anthology approaches the post-Katrina America and race from a different vantage point, they all contend with the meaning of black suffering within American democracy. Before reading a word, each text calls up the angst of those tragic days in late August and September of 2005. All three covers bear gothic, Gordon Parks-style photographs – images that are nothing less than miserable grace their covers – immortalizing democracy’s graphic elegy. Those stark images lay the foundation for a series of sobering essays. The effects of the breached levees in 2005 are laid over a historical narrative of New Orleans, filled with endemic poverty and racism – to return New Orleans to its pre-Katrina state would be unjust. We are reminded in each text that fully one-quarter of African-American men and one-third of African-American women in New Orleans lived below the poverty line prior to Katrina. As Bruce Katz detailed in “Concentrated Poverty in New Orleans and Other American Cities” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/4/06):
Where was god? These realities coalesced in real-time as the nation watched thousands of fellow citizens left to their own devices in the face of a Category Five hurricane. My search for meaning during several months in the Lower Ninth Ward led me to demand, as have others: Where was god? Why had not god intervened? It is a question of theodicy and democracy at once. How could a good god allow those whose existence was miserable before the storm be silent in such a moment of tragedy and need? In his foreword to After the Storm, legal scholar Derrick Bell leaps to respond to my concern for god’s absence. “How can we awaken that sense of humanity within us that some call God to address the needs of those whose plight is the fault of man, not God? Perhaps, as many theologians think, we should view God not as a superbeing somewhere up there who determines our fates and can, at will intervene in our lives.” After the Storm effectively contrasts these existential and theological questions with the human evidence of abandonment of responsibility. Blacks are not exempt: in his the book’s introduction, Charles Ogletree highlights the Essence Festival, which annually attracts over 100,000 African Americans to the Superdome to sway to R&B and neo-soul artists. It is a harsh juxtaposition with the image of masses stranded for days in that same structure. Similarly, John Valery White problematizes Mayor Ray Nagin’s symbolic political leadership and questions his commitment to poor blacks. Governmental neglect and malfeasance is, of course, at the heart of the discourse. David Troutt cites the history of urban ghettoization through public housing policy and construction in “Many Thousands Gone, Again.” And writing from a hotel room in Canada, from which she watched the devastation unfold, Sheryl Cashin reconsiders the role of urban organizations in light of Kanye West’s infamous proclamation, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Race or class? Conversely, Adolph Reed lambastes the focus on race. In his terse essay, “The Real Divide,” Reed incisively highlights the role of class. He rejects race as the primary tool of analysis for two reasons: first, “the language of race and racism is too imprecise to describe effectively even how patterns of injustice and inequality are racialized in a post-Jim Crow world.” Second, Reed argues that many liberals gravitate to the language of racism not simply because it makes them feel righteous but also because is doesn’t carry any political warrant beyond exhorting people not to be racist. Reed contends that use of race obscures class and does not recognize a fundamental crisis in the political economy. Racism, for Reed, “can be a one-word description and explanation of patterns of unequal distribution of income and wealth, services and opportunities, police brutality, a stockbrokers inability to get a cab, neighborhood dislocation and gentrification, poverty, unfair criticism of black or Latino athletes, or being denied admission to a boutique. Because the category is so porous, it doesn’t explain anything. Indeed, it is an alternative to explanation.” Yet race must be addressed as we consider the phenomena of New Orleans. Focusing on the descriptions of a black man carrying a bag as a “looter” and a white couple as having “found” food, Cheryl I. Harris and Devon W. Carbado investigate the role of racial logic in articulating the activities of stranded residents in the flood’s immediate aftermath. “Loot or Find? Fact or Frame” strives to unmask the colorblind discourse surrounding race in the American media. Michael Eric Dyson skillfully categorizes the forms of migration experienced by black folk and situates Katrina in that context. Clement Alexander Price methodologically discusses the Galveston, Texas flood of 1900, finding poor blacks to be peculiarly vulnerable to nature disasters. These essays and others counter Reed’s claim of race being inappropriate to describe this current crisis. His claim obscures the blackness of suffering in late modernity. Where Reed is correct is in saying that race and class need to engage in a more intimate dialogue – and within that conversation we also need to include gender.
Gender, age, and neoliberalism In There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster, that linkage is made most evident in an essay by co-editor Chester Hartman and social policy analyst Avis Jones-DeWeever. In “Abandoned Before the Storms,” the co-authors illustrate with wonkish precision the dismal unemployment and poverty rates for African-American women. “In fact, of the 43 states with sample sizes large enough to provide a reliable measure of African-American women’s earnings, Louisiana ranked worst in the nation with full-time annual earnings of only $19,400.” Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s chapter, “Katrina and the Politics of Later Life,” provide a unique argument. “Ageism,” she theorizes, “at the level of feelings is a peculiar privilege, compelling but ominous.” Ageism has this in common with racism or sexism: it forbids thinking “we can ever be them.” People over 50 died in far greater numbers in the storm’s aftermath. These unwarranted deaths are linked to an ideology of decline, writes Gulette. “Ageism is wrapped up in neoliberal state policy on behalf of postindustrial capital. Power, not the needs of the woman on the baggage mover or the 45-year-old on workers’ comp, drives the ideology of declines.” Our national state, like others, is “promoting and funding market solutions” in a “race to the bottom” to see “how much and how fast social expenditures may be reduced in order to transfer more national wealth to the corporate sector.” This is a global effort, she maintains. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are “at the forefront of attempts to foster a political climate conducive to reducing the state welfare of old age.” The insertions of ageism and gender to the Katrina discourse speak to the level of nuance needed to understand what has been unmasked about American “democracy” – and the global economy. Filled with graphs and numbers, There Is No Such Thing provides insights on the role of financial institutions alongside grassroots organizing, medical needs, pre and post-public education crisis and the public housing. The book’s most important element is that it puts forth a strong set of policies – ones that would not rebuild New Orleans, but create a deeper democracy. Women ignored What Lies Beneath offers a chorus of indigenous voices. Like a jazz band, steeped in improvisation, the work is the most heartfelt and wise of the three. Edited by the South End Press collective, the book is both dramatic and elegant. The personal struggles for survival are absent from the other pair of anthologies. This collection poignantly retells several of these stories. Charmine Neville, of the famous musical family, painfully recounts being raped. She then describes how, despite such a violation, she continued – like Harriet Tubman – to go back and get those who had been left behind. In her simply titled essay, “How We Survived the Flood,” she recalls:
The question of violence during Katrina and its aftermath is a problematic, layered one. In “To Render Ourselves Visible,” the radical feminist collective INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence editors problematize the topic by looking both at how some survivors were criminalized as well as the silence by organizers and analysts on the question of sexual violence against women and children. This leads them to declare:
With a broad lens of critique, the INCITE! authors also point to how outside organizations and individuals ignored local leadership – and how women of color from New Orleans have organized themselves in response. Throughout the anthology, women’s and other voices from New Orleans are lifted up; not as a footnote, but rather a powerful testimony to the endurance of the poor, and those who are their chosen representatives. The stories of community groups – like Common Ground, the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, and the Black Women’s Health Project – are told by the organizers themselves. What Lies Beneath also succeeds by evoking the tales of suffering through different forms of writing. The poetic pen of Kalamu ya Salaam and Suheir Hammad lend beauty to the pain of this experience. Jared Sexton’s stirring essay, “The Obscurity of Black Suffering,” illustrates the invisibility of poor black folk both inside and outside of the black community. Sexton’s notion of obscurity sits at the center of my own sense of emptiness concerning New Orleans. Faith after the storm In what I believe will be recorded as my generation’s “Montgomery,” I cried every day. While the Interfaith Worker Justice Center that I went to New Orleans to open is up and running, staffed with interns, I still feel defeated. Perhaps, it is because New Orleans taught me what I did not know. My faith was shaken; my vocation questioned; my sense of professional success shattered; and any messianic impulse that I have ever possessed receded with the floodwaters. While I have fully lost faith in the capacity of national African-American leadership and the white progressive establishment to answer DuBois’s question, I have gained a deeper appreciation of the work of everyday folk to change their lot. Like faith itself, the local organizers of New Orleans are the substance of what I hoped for and the evidence of what I could not see. I, like the many authors of these three collections, am struggling with my own meaning in the face of black suffering at the beginning of the 21st century. I thank whatever gods there may be for these anthologies and organizers because I now know a little more. Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou is a contributing editor to Fellowship. He spent six months in New Orleans organizing the city’s Interfaith Worker Justice Center. Rev. Sekou is currently serving as a senior community minister at Judson Memorial Church in New York City. ©2007 Fellowship of Reconciliation |
