It is hard to believe that five years have passed since Hurricane Katrina swept over the Gulf Coast, devastating the region, killing over 1,800, displacing thousands and leaving $80 billion in property damage. But five years it has been nonetheless. And of course, we all remember the breaking of the levees in New Orleans, which led to the flooding of that great city and the deaths of hundreds, many of whom were poor and people of color with nowhere to hide.
Those levees—seemingly constructed of little more than lego, silly puddy and tape, not exactly a marvel of American engineering—stood and fell as a symbol of years of government neglect. The Bush administration’s lack of a response to the plight of the mostly chocolate city of New Orleans following Katrina of was a potent example of America’s callousness towards poverty and black and brown people.
Speaking of then-President Bush’s bungling of the Katrina aftermath, Kanye West said that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Well, now we have an African-American president named Barack Obama. And while much has changed in the Gulf Coast region since 2005, many things have remained the same as far as black people are concerned. And while the president has taken steps to improve the quality of life in the region, he has been criticized for not doing enough to help African-Americans who are being left out of the recovery efforts. Plus, the recent BP oil disaster in the Gulf Coast hasn’t exactly helped things. Now is a good time to ask the question, does President Obama really care about black people?
Despite a $10.5 billion relief aid package under the previous president, the Bush legacy in the Gulf is one of incompetence, with some racism and classism mixed in. Public perceptions combined with a healthy dose of reality made it appear that the fix was in for the disproportionately black victims of the region. It speaks to a conservative hatred of government and claims that government does not work. So, when politicians who subscribe to that ideology get into office, they find the worst people to run the agencies they don’t like, in order to blow it all up and create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
WATCH NBC NIGHTLY NEWS OF KATRINA — FIVE YEARS LATER:
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There was the “heckuva job” performed by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Michael “Brownie” Brown, a former horse show judge. Barbara Bush, President Bush’s mother, declared her son’s response to Katrina a success, concluding that the poor people relocated to Houston were better off than before: “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas,” Barbara Bush said in a radio interview. “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”
And there were the infamous 120,000 or so FEMA trailers, $2.7 billion in temporary housing laden with formaldehyde, resulting in disastrous health consequences for thousands of people, ranging from respiratory problems to cancer and death.
Nevertheless, President Obama inherited these problems, and now he owns them.
And the problems are many. For example, wealthy whites with more well-to-do businesses received Katrina loans from the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) before poor and black neighborhoods. Plagued with mismanagement, the SBA — the federal agency whose mission is to “aid, counsel, assist and protect the interests of small business concerns.” — turned away 55 percent of hurricane victims who applied. Moreover, of those who were approved for loans, only 60 percent actually received the money. The highest SBA acceptance rate in New Orleans was in the wealthy Lakeview section, while the lowest were in poor black areas such as the Lower Ninth Ward. SBA even approved 66 percent of loan applications in white part of suburban St. Bernard Parish, but approved only 42 percent in an adjacent black area with similar median household income.
Five years later, there are signs of recovery in New Orleans, but not everyone is sharing in it. Homelessness has doubled to about 12,000. As many as 6,000 people are living 55,000 abandoned buildings across the city, with 75 percent of them suffering from mental illness, physical disabilities and other serious conditions. And while business is good in the French Quarter, Katrina is still being felt in the black Lower Ninth ward. This city of half a million people is about one-third smaller than it was.
About 1 in 10 residents did not live in New Orleans before Katrina. A whole host of people ranging from businesspeople to volunteers—”substantially younger, more educated, [and] more likely to be white” than the local folks— have descended on the city to partake in the rebuilding. In 2009, New Orleans’ GDP was $9 billion higher than in 2005, and tourism brought $4.2 billion to New Orleans. Although 7.5 million visitors came to the city last year, up from 3.7 million in 2006, the 70,000 tourism jobs are 15,000 fewer than pre-Katrina levels. Only a third of the city’s residents say their lives are back to normal, and 70 percent say that America has forgotten all about them. Also forgotten is the New Orleans diaspora — refugees of the storm who fled to all 50 states of the union, many of them perhaps never to return. There are 54 counties in 10 states where at least 1,000 migrants still reside, in places as distant as Los Angeles, Cook County, Illinois, and Maricopa County, Arizona.
Just to add to the suffering in the Gulf Coast region, the recent BP oil disaster spilled countless tons into the ocean, amounting to the worst environmental disaster in history. Referred to by some critics as Obama’s Katrina, the fact remains that the administration appeared to wait too long before taking action. Too much faith, it seems, was placed in the ability of a fumbling, bumbling, self-interested oil giant to do the right thing and clean up the mess. The White House and BP even downplayed the disaster. In addition, without consulting federal environmental officials, the president called for an expansion of offshore drilling in March, before the deadly accident took place.
Meanwhile, the Department of Interior, which deals with the conservation of federal land and natural resources and was charged with coordinating the federal response to the spill, has been too cozy with oil interests. Federal oil inspectors working in the Gulf took gifts such as meals and tickets to sporting events from oil companies they were charged with overseeing. In addition, the Department, which is headed by Secretary Ken Salazar, who is Latino, has a problem with maintaining a diverse workforce. In July, the department recently lost a discrimination case in which a supervisor called black subordinates “monkeys.” To add to Salazar’s problems, his chief of staff took a so-called “work focused” trip of white-water rafting at the Grand Canyon, after the oil slick had spread and the crisis was apparent.
Even now, after the deep water spill has been capped, problems exist below, with 80 percent of the oil still remaining in the ocean. The spill is poisoning local residents, and hundreds of cleanup workers have reported health effects such as of headaches, chest pain, vomiting and trouble breathing, not to mention mental health effects such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Apparently Corexit — the dispersant that BP liberally used to break up the oil spill and destroy the visible evidence, rendering it out of sight and out of mind— is in many ways more toxic than the oil itself.
Although we may not know the full extent of the damage for quite some time, this hazardous chemical can reduce the fish population by 25 percent or more, and can wipe out bottom feeder populations of shrimp, crabs, lobsters and crawfish.
And just as racism reared its ugly head in the Katrina aftermath, there is even racism in the BP cleanup effort that the administration is supposed to monitor. As Dr. Robert D. Bullard, Director of the Clark Atlanta Environmental Center said in a report by veteran journalist Linn Washington, minority communities are “getting dumped on” with pollution but deriving no benefit from the billions of dollars spent on the cleanup. The waste from the oil spill is landing up in black communities. Around 40,000 tons of waste have been dumped in African-American areas, the way people of color have been dumped on for years as victims of environmental racism in Louisiana and elsewhere. Further, the dirty, dangerous cleanup is performed mostly by black and Latino workers, who work 12 hours a day, seven days a week under prison camp conditions that include curfews and restriction of movement. Some of these workers live in the infamous post-Katrina FEMA trailers that were banned because they were making people sick. These migrant workers of color are even met with Confederate flags by angry, racist white residents in places such as Grand Isle, and denied service at local eating establishments—yes, in 2010.
But Obama and the federal government are making positive accomplishments. For example, Obama was responsible for setting up a $20 billion BP fund to deal with claims related to economic loss and damage residents experienced from the oil disaster. Already, $368 million in settlements have been paid out. The Obama stimulus program has benefited Louisiana, even if that state’s governor Bobby Jindal threatened to join other Southern governors and refuse to accept the money. Obama recently gave $25 million to the Gulf region for recovery efforts, out of a total recovery funding of $2.5 billion to date from this administration.
FEMA under Obama is attempting to avoid the missteps of the Bush years by being better prepared to respond to disasters. The Army Corps of Engineers has strengthened the hurricane protections for New Orleans, though we can only hope that they work with hurricane season upon us. And the U.S. Justice Department is cleaning up the New Orleans police department, with 13 indictments against cops who killed civilians, including the pre-Katrina beating death of a man in the Treme section. This comes amidst reports that police were given the green light to shoot looters in the Katrina aftermath.
Meanwhile the nation’s “black belt”, Southern states with substantial African-American populations, including the Gulf Coast states, is a region that can’t catch a break. Consistently, they remain at the bottom of the barrel. For example, Louisiana, which is one-third African-American, ranks number 44 in education and number two in poverty, and has the nation’s second highest infant mortality rate. Mississippi , 37 percent black, ranks first in the nation in poverty and infant mortality, second in childhood poverty, and ranks 48th out of 50 states in educational standards. Alabama ranks ninth in poverty, and third in infant mortality. The state is 26 percent African-American. Texas, which is 12 percent black, boasts the eighth highest poverty rate in the country.
The question remains, does President Obama care about black people? The answer is a qualified yes. I say qualified because while this president seems inclined to do the right thing, particularly by his base, he is prone to flinch and blink on issues of race. The reflexive dismissal of black officials such as green jobs czar Van Jones and former USDA employee Shirley Sherrod are a few examples.
Furthermore, the health care debate demonstrated that the Obama administration is prone to cave in under the slightest pressure, and bargain away the farm to conservative interests with little in return. And the president is poorly served by his advisors, some of whom act unconcerned or at least clueless when it comes to issues affecting black people.
The recovery of the Gulf Coast is intrinsically intertwined with race. This is not a post-racial America, nor is it a post-partisan one. To come to grips with the problems in the Gulf is to deal with the disparities caused by racism. Only then will we see real change.