Hurricane Katrina--Invisible to the tourist eye

I chose to take a Hurricane Katrina Tour yesterday. My interest in the tour disturbed me. I didn't want to be the sensational tourist who wanted to see other people's devastation, but I wanted to understand and see for myself the lack of resources that have been placed toward this effort to rebuild. Seeing what New Orleans offers on the surface and what is easily available to tourists makes it too easy to overlook that so much has not been done. It makes it easy for me to be comfortable listening to jazz, eating jambalaya, and going back home thinking everything is fine.

Everything is not fine.

Over three years later, as we travelled around to the different parts of the city, I could still see houses marked with an "X" and "TFW" (Task Force Washington) to let people know the house had been checked and cleared. There were entire shopping centers still vacant and in disrepair. There were very large homes with tall weeds all around them because no one had returned to that property.

The blight was not limited to poor neighborhoods, although many of the wealthier neighborhoods were often located on higher ground and weren't as affected. Small and large houses alike had been hit and were left behind--vacant and now overgrown.

The entire city is like a neglected urban area....like a giant "inner city neighborhood." I couldn't help but think of the $700 billion that has been approved to bail out the economy and has been given to people who knew what they were doing and could've changed course...yet we left an entire city whose commerce and culture is just as vitally important to our country to figure out how to fix their own problems.

Something about that seems terribly wrong. The scars because of our terrible mistake are, unfortunately, hidden--except to those who continue to be affected.

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While listening to some great jazz music at Preservation Hall I met two people who had come to New Orleans about 18 months ago to work with Habitat for Humanity and Americorps through the St. Bernard Parish Project to help rebuild homes. I believe he said they had built around 50 homes during that time period.

One of the guest drummers works with Sweet Home New Orleans, a non-profit agency that offers social services and financial assistance to the city’s musicians, Mardi Gras Indians, and Social Aid & Pleasure Club members. Sweet Home’s mission is to perpetuate New Orleans’ cultural traditions by providing direct services to the individuals and institutions that will carry them forward.

I also purchased a book called 1 Dead in Attic that is a recently updated version of personal accounts that have happened during and since the hurricane.

After seeing what still needs to be done and talking to people who are doing it, I would highly recommend that you invest some of your money into these two organizations. I'm sure there are more, but these two are ones that I have talked directly to people working with them. People are working hard to rebuild this city with no help from the government. I hear people talk about how we should leave things up to the people...so here it is. New Orleans still needs help. Please consider helping monetarily, coming to rebuild with the local organizations already in existence, or even moving here to take a teaching job.

Many have not moved back because of lack of resources. Housing prices have risen, businesses have disappeared, jobs are not available. Jobs can't become available until people move back and people can't move back until jobs are available. I would encourage everyone to help if at all possible.

To see the slideshow of my New Orleans/Hurricane Katrina pics, click here.

Here a few to preview:

The realities of Katrina still live in people

Not too long ago I met a 17-year old girl from New Orleans. As I was taking her home one evening, I asked her if she had moved to Dallas because of the hurricane. She did.

She began explaining the horror and the fear she and her family endured during the hurricane as they moved to the upstairs of their home, then had to break through the attic as the water rose higher and higher. She explained that they were ordered to evacuate a couple of weeks before for a different hurricane scare and they didn't have the money to evacuate again. They were hoping this would also be a false alarm, but as the water rushed in, they knew they were in trouble.

They were stranded on their rooftop with only a box of cereal. She talked about how they communicated from the rooftops with three other families, trying to figure out a plan to survive. Helicopters kept flying over, but none bothered to stop.

After three days on their rooftop, the four families decided they needed to get to the infamous bridge that they could see from their rooftop. They could now see that buses had begun arriving taking people to safety.

The families used a door that the hurricane winds and water had busted off of its hinges and began taking turns swimming and using the door for a floating device. However, after their horrendous journey swimming through the waters, the bridge did not offer them the route to safety they had hoped for.

So few buses and so many people created chaos. Perhaps on purpose, the buses kept stopping on opposite ends of the bridge causing people to run back and forth trying to get to find safety...trying to get out, often losing the people they were trying so desperately to hang on to. At a last ditch effort, my friend was able to lurch onto a bus and hang on to her mother, despite the official's attempt to separate their hands.

You would never know all she went through by talking to her. She said it has taken her quite a while to be able to talk about it. But as she talks, she lights up as she remembers the music, the culture, the city where she once lived.

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In the French Quarter where I am...and I'm sure where most tourists go...the memories of a hurricane, to the naked eye are gone. But, it is my friend and the remaining devastation that prevents her from moving back that I think of as I sit in Cafe du Monde eating beignets and drinking coffee.

Hurricane Katrina...a thing of the past???

I'm afraid that for many of us, Hurricane Katrina is something that happened (past tense). Unfortunately, for so many others, Katrina is very much a present tense issue...yet something that few are paying attention to. A friend of mine explained that when he went home to visit not long ago, his relatives still didn't have running water. Below is a fairly long piece, but one I strongly recommend reading. Kalamu is a friend of a friend. He communicates a powerful but very sad word about the lives in New Orleans. Please read:

N.O. Way to Live. Comments from Kalamu ya Salaam in New Orleans.

WHAT NOW? By Kalamu ya Salaam

Less than half the pre-storm population has returned to New Orleans to face the music. Housing for non-home owners is expensive to non-existent. Health care, ditto. Other than construction and fast food service, jobs are scare, benefits miserly. Public education and the lottery have a lot in common, you can play, but only a handful hit the jackpot.

Beyond the daily battles a new and even more disturbing trend emerges: seniors are dying, youth are leaving. Seniors dying from strokes, heat attacks, and cancer fill the obituary pages. In our city seniors were a social safety net. From baby-sitting to first responders to crisis, we counted on Big Mamas and Auntees, Parans and Nannans (God-parents), uncles and older cousins.

Since Katrina, we can no longer count on them.Vital health care services are gone, simple check-ups and routine medications are now rarely available. Although the stress of living in a trailer combined with a fourteen-month history of untreated diabetes or undiagnosed cancer is a lethal cocktail, it's not dramatic enough to become national news, after-all tens of thousands of Americans survive without adequate health care or insurance.

For youth on the edge of adulthood, the outlook is even bleaker. Imagine, your name is Tyeasha. You're seventeen. The housing development where you lived has been boarded up for over a year and a half. The high school you attended may never re-open. Your family is flung across city and state lines. Is that why you find yourself staring at empty buildings?

Or you could be Aaron unable to go outside after school because the smell from across the street aggravates your asthma. The local drug lord is cooking cocaine, which he will later dispense from the corner. But you're no snitch, and besides the police are corrupt and won't protect you. Since you're a high school sophomore, you only have two more years to put up with this and then you're out of here.

Gabe graduated from the University of New Orleans this past December and now she is working in a high school writing program. Gabe wants to help rebuild her city but she's pretty sure she won't raise her family here. Crime is bad and the educational system worst but it's the little things that really get to her, like no grocery store anywhere near her neighborhood. Should you really have to drive three or four miles just to buy beans, rice and chicken?

Theresa is trying hard not to drop out. She'll be twenty-one soon. One year kept back. One year lost to Katrina. The following year shunted between schools until finally she was informed: we can't find your transcript, you'll just have to repeat.

An Angelica at one school was doing well but her family broke apart and so now she's in Memphis after both she and her mother were battered by her father. Meanwhile, Angelica at another school had vowed to finish her senior year but now they've moved across the river and...

I wish Brittany good luck in dodging the Marine recruiter. In a moment of confusion she signed an intent to volunteer. She was seventeen. What else was she going to do? Her mother died when she was eight. Her father, well, forget about that. Katrina scattered her siblings. Brittany currently has no where to live in the city. So she gets up at five a.m. to catch a commute bus from Baton Rouge to New Orleans in order to finish her senior year while staying with a sister who lives eighty miles from school. It's not even a month yet and Brittany can't keep it up.

Kenneth's cousin was killed on Christmas eve, or was it Christmas day? It seems like bad news never stops. None of these stories are sexy enough for news anchors to share. People succumbing to cancer. Children dropping out of public school. What else is new?

I hear they're having Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Everything must be getting back to normal. Pre-Katrina "Big Easy" was already a disaster. Now New Orleans sometimes gives Baghdad a fierce run for the money-twelve murders over the 2007 New Year's holidays and we're officially the per capita murder capitol of America.

Driving across a town where you constantly run into broken traffic lights, where sparsely populated neighborhoods are patrolled by armed national guard, and where the emergency trauma center-should you have an accident-is located five miles outside the city limits, as you negotiate these truly mean streets the thought is never far from your mind: why am I still here?

I'm 59. I teach five high school classes, five days a week. New Orleans was my home. This "new" New Orleans is another country in which I feel like an alien. Daily some non-native consultant arrives to do a study or offer a bold, innovative rebuilding plan. Meanwhile the physical and social infrastructure disintegrates, undelivered state and federal aid is shrouded in bureaucracy, thousands of vacant houses have not been touched since before the flood.

Everyday I face young men and women, each with a particular story, a specific need, an individual reaction to the aftermath. They are traumatized.

Mekele says she couldn't stop crying New Year's day and she is trying hard to rationalize away her fear of rain. What I want people to understand is simple. New Orleans doesn't have to be ignored. America spends over eight billion dollars a month in Iraq. How much has the government spent to rebuild post Katrina?

It may be difficult to understand right now, but I believe New Orleans is everywhere USA. We really need to prioritize the social and physical reconstruction of urban America. Our seniors are dying. Our youth are leaving. We're ignoring the past and killing the future. This is no way to live.

Writer and filmmaker Kalamu ya Salaam (Kalamu@aol.com) is co-director of Students at the Center, a writing program in the New Orleans public schools.

More details about his work are available at: http://www.kalamu.com/

Revealing truth about our subconscious discrimination

I know race is a very sensitive issue and people would like to deny that it still exists as an obstacle. However, it is always interesting to me when studies are done and when statistics are presented that show the only explanation for the discrimination is the color of someone's skin. Read the article below, from the Washington Post.

The Color of Disaster Assistance
By Richard MorinFriday, June 9, 2006; Page A02
Americans are more willing to provide extended government assistance to white victims of Hurricane Katrina than to African Americans and other minorities -- particularly blacks with darker skin.
Overall, the "penalty" for being black and a Katrina victim amounted to about $1,000, according to the latest online study by The Washington Post, washingtonpost.com and Shanto Iyengar, director of the Political Communication Lab at Stanford University.

More than 2,300 individuals participated in the latest experiment, which tested how much subconscious racial bias shapes attitudes toward disaster relief. Participants went to a Web site that featured a brief news article about the effect of the hurricane. A photo of an individual featured in the story accompanied the article.

But here's the trick: The race, gender and occupation of the featured person varied. Some participants read an article about a flood victim named Terry Miller who was depicted in the photo as a black man; others read the same item, except the Terry Miller in the photo was a white man, while in others, Terry became a black or a white woman. (The Latino victim was named Terry Medina.) In some photos, the skin tone of the person was darker; in others, it was lighter.

After reading the article, participants were asked to indicate how much government aid hurricane victims should get for housing and general living expenses. For each type of assistance, participants could give from $200 to $1,200 per month, and from a minimum of three months to a maximum of 18 months.

If race mattered, there would be a difference in the level of assistance favored by respondents who read an article about the white Terry Miller and the assistance favored by those who read about a black Terry Miller.

There was. People were willing to give assistance to a white victim, on average, for about 12 months. But for an African American victim, the average duration was a month shorter while the amount of aid was nearly the same, meaning that blacks would collect about $1,000 less than white victims.

Skin tone also mattered. A darker-skinned black received about $100 a month less over a shorter period of time than a light-skinned white, all other factors being equal -- a huge effect. Content of the articles also made a difference: Participants were the least generous after reading one article on looting.

"These results suggest that news media coverage of natural disasters can shape the audience's response," Iyengar said. "Framing the disaster in ways that evoke racial stereotypes can make people less supportive of large-scale relief efforts. News reports about flooding evoke one set of apparently positive images in the reader's mind; reports about lawlessness evoke quite another."

Read a complete analysis of the results of the experiment.

The Ideal City

Over a year after Hurricane Katrina, the disaster is still being talked about...and not in a positive way. So many people recognize the racism that Katrina exposed. I just read a blog about it this morning...http://www.justdemocracyblog.org/ (look at the May 24 entry).

I would not want to be in the shoes of the people who are tasked with trying to rebuild the city and figure things out. However, it did occur to me several months ago that the fact that New Orleans was completely wiped out provides us with a perfect opportunity to make a conscious effort toward equality in this country.

We have quite a tainted past in the way people of color have been treated. Slavery. Lynching. Jim Crow. De jure to de facto segregation. What has happened in our past has led up to the way we deal with our present. Because so much of the racism and classism is ingrained in our society, we have often brushed it aside and explained it away, justifying our choices to live in certain neighborhoods and around certain people because that's where we've always lived, that's who we grew up with, or whatever the other reasons might be.

But it seems to me New Orleans provides the ideal opportunity for us to create the ideal city. To me, the fact that Katrina destroyed entire communities that need to be rebuilt provides us (the United States) a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If a city must be rebuilt, why not rebuild it in a way that mixes low-income and wealthy, single family homes and apartments, people of color and White people? I know it can be done. I had read about other places that have created "ideal communities" defined by their own terms of what they thought an ideal community should look like.

Creating these ideal communities have been met with much resistance across our nation. Middle- and upper-class people do not want poor people moving in beside them. As much as we say we don't mind what color our neighbors are, in doing research, I've found that we are ok with a variety of cultures around us as long as they act and think just like us. I would like to think that the resistance is due to people already being established in environments where they are comfortable and they simply don't want to shake up that feeling of comfort.

However, the fact that New Orleans was predominantly Black before Katrina and seems to be predominantly White now, the fact that larger homes in predominantly White areas are getting rebuilt while the predominantly Black neighborhoods are being restricted, tells me that despite people's arguments to the contrary, Katrina not only exposed the racism that exists, it also exposes the fact that we, in this country, are not ready or willing to do anything about changing the institutionalized racism in our country for the future.