Linh Dinh and Darrel Lum

It's hard for me to understand the narrator of "Dead on Arrival." Is he coldblooded and amoral? The scene where he kills a classmate, if not merely a fantasy, is chilling. Is he feeling the pain of his situation but unable to articulate it? Clearly, he's traumatized by the North Vietnam/South Vietnam conflict: he says that he cannot wait to kill his "enemies," i.e., the North Vietnamese communists, who have killed his uncles and threaten his immediate family. At the same time, some of his reflections on his immediate world are poignant: his experience running into his mother with her "new husband," for example, suggests the pain of the encounter, much as in Jhumapa Lahiri's story, "Sexy." But the narrator of Linh's story never comments on how painful this must be for him -- everything about his emotional world is left to the reader to imagine.

Also, his comments on America and Americans, while naive in some sense, have a kind of ironic accuracy. Clearly, he is influenced by America's good repute in South Vietnam during the war, when America was the South's ally against the communist North. Yet he is able to pick out social problems or paradoxes of American culture that suggest a strange awareness of the problems America has always faced in dealing with its racial/ethnic/cultural others: "So-called white Americans are really red (they look red). Black Americans are blue. Red Americans are yellow" (110). This comment certainly reflects Linh's own status as an Asian-American writer at the time of this story's composition. And yet it also reflects something beyond the simple reality that one culture's perceptions may be entirely different than another's, in even the simplest (or most fundamental) ways. Color, Linh suggests, like otherness -- even political otherness a continent away -- is always understood in culturally prescribed ways.

Darrel Lum's protagonist, by contrast, is less traumatized, less violent, and perhaps more hopeful about his situation, and his persona seems to reflect the possibilities for cross-cultural understanding that Lum's story imagines. While he speaks in a pidgin English that recalls Henry Roth's young immigrants on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn, Daniel also evidently wants to succeed in a culture whose most powerful figures are the "haole" teachers and principal of the school. Once Daniel realizes that he will be singled out in uncomfortable ways if he succeeds too obviously, he tries his best not to distinguish himself. And yet he feels the frustration of his teacher, Miss Hashimoto, when he fails at the school's spelling bee. He hadn't meant to fail that time -- he had simply erred, but she is convinced that he, like the other students, has given up on the possibility of success and contents himself instead in the role of failure. Like Linh's unnamed narrator, Daniel has adolescent sexual conflicts, but his are so much more innocent, less wracked by catastrophe as a backdrop.

--Lincoln

The Racial Perceptions Divide

Elisabeth Bumiller's article in the Times today effectively conveys the White House's fears that the bungled federal response to the Hurricane Katrina catatrophe in New Orleans will affect the Republican party's standing among African Americans. Bumiller cites the unsurprising but nevertheless telling statistic that two-thirds of blacks polled viewed the race of the victims as an important factor in the lethargic federal response to the disaster, while 77% of whites felt otherwise. The very fact of these nearly reversed ratios—whatever the reality that lies behind them—suggests the extent to which the "color-line" of which Du Bois wrote continues to divide, or at least fracture, the nation.

Blameless? Katrina, Race, and Representation

"Race has nothing to do with this disaster." That sentiment is now the official story, echoed in press briefings by high-ranking officials such as Condoleezza Rice and in numberless television talk show commentaries. How closely does this official line reflect the reality of what has happened since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast?

Not surprisingly, there is no smoking gun that proves that the lag time in federal response to the disaster has had anything to do with race. Yet the distressing images and lopsided demographics of those who endured the chaos of post-hurricane New Orleans suggest that the tell-tale significance of race relations inheres in the politics of emergency disaster relief as much as it does in other political spheres like electoral campaigns, voting, redistricting, social security, public education, criminal justice, and, above all, local and federal economic policies. In each of these spheres, "race" is a word that dare not speak its name in contemporary American political discourse, despite its continuing social salience and the undeniable evidence of race-specific economic effects that result from supposedly neutral public policy. The socioeconomic impact of race, in turn, is most clearly revealed to Americans at moments of social crisis, such as that precipitated by the fury of Hurricane Katrina.

When Michael Omi and Howard Winant wrote their seminal analysis of the politics of race in American society, Racial Formation in the United States (Routledge 1986, rev'd. 1994), their principal task was to offer an archaeology of the concept of race in the face of overwhelming evidence that racial discourse was being driven underground by the "color-blind" agenda of American neoconservative politics. Omi and Winant describe such anamnestic politics, and their meliorative (or leveling) neoliberal counterparts, as the most recent iteration of the kinds of "racial projects" that have marked American history since the nation's inception. They warn of the twin temptations of thinking of race as an essence ("fixed, concrete, and objective"), or as a mere illusion, "a purely ideological construct which some ideal non-racist social order would eliminate" (1994:54). They argue that it is necessary, instead, "to understand race as an unstable and 'decentered' complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle" (55).

The only antidote to racism, Omi and Winant insist, is to "notice race" and thereby to "challenge the state, the institutions of civil society, and ourselves as individuals to combat the legacy of inequality and injustice inherited from the past" (159). The images flickering across TV screens since August 29th, when Katrina barreled ashore, were belatedly acknowledged by the corporate media as reflections of a deeper political history of the US and, in particular, of the American South. That history is shaped by racial projects that consist of shifting cultural representations and economic structures. It is as absurd to erase this history as it is to ignore the racial elements of the catastrophe in New Orleans still unfolding before our stunned eyes. While racism in its crudest and most essentialistic form may or may not have tainted the official response to the New Orleans debacle, the aftermath of the storm requires an analysis of race that would help to explain why an extraordinary number of those who were most severely affected are African-Americans; how official relief was meted out among the survivors in direst need; and how the American public at large has reacted to these devastating images and to the unpardonably slow rescue efforts.

A time-line of official responses to the disaster, which suggests the magnitude of federal ineptitude or disregard, can be found here.

Among those who have focused on race as an element of the disaster most in need of explanation is Anya Kamenetz, a freelance author who grew up in New Orleans. She argues in a Village Voice editorial, "My Flood of Tears," that race has played such an enormous role in the unfolding of events because for New Orleans, more obviously than elsewhere, race is not just a central element of the city's history. It also warps the city's present conditions insofar as the spoils of a racist history are still vastly unevenly distributed.

In a similar vein, Dan Rabinowitz of Haaretz reminds his readers that "catastrophes don't just happen." Rabinowitz sharply admonishes those who refuse to acknowledge the ideological roots of this disaster:

It is impossible to understand [the collapse of order in New Orleans] without relating to poverty and racism. Black people, most of them poor, constituted 68 percent of the population of New Orleans until Katrina arrived, and it was natural that the vast majority of the people without cars who were stuck in the city were black: a weak and weakened population, full of bitterness after generations in which they were abandoned to poverty, ignorance and crime. For these people, the police, the federal authorities, the supermarket chains and the department stores are the enemy. They looted food in order to survive, and took electrical appliances, clothing and shoes to return to themselves, on the backdrop of the disappearing city, something of what White America has always denied them. The social collapse of New Orleans is the shameful fruit of the ideology of "every man for himself," and of the budgetary and political policy — of each individual city and county — that derives from this.

Rabinowitz's biting commentary effectively sums up what I and others have found so shocking about the terrible events themselves and their representation in the corporate media. What is painfully evident to media watchers like myself and to many of the most incisive public editorialists is that the material history of the Katrina tragedy begins long before the end of August. President Bush and his administration, as many have pointed out, began dismembering FEMA in his first term, despite earlier efforts by the Clinton administration to restore the agency to the fiscal health of its earlier years. This was part of the relentless "starve the beast" policy of reducing vital government services for poor and working-class Americans while cutting taxes for the wealthiest citizens.

But the problems that turned this natural catastrophe into a societal tragedy go beyond these specific policies and this particular political moment. The responsibility for the grinding poverty of so many New Orleaneans cannot be laid at the feet of a single administration or even a specific political program. The roots of economic inequality in New Orleans, intertwined as it is with the legacy of racist American politics and policy, are planted much deeper in our national history than the major media is generally capable of acknowledging, let alone discussing in any depth. Television snippets and newspaper reports simply cannot adequately address this long, complex, and sordid national experience. And yet, a comprehensive analysis and redressing of this history should not be the task of academics and political activists solely. What is needed is a broad public discussion of race and class as fundamental American concerns in the 21st century — concerns that touch upon the many different layers of public policy, socioeconomic structure, resource distribution, and cultural production. In the absence of such a discussion, the nation will continue to be haunted by its past and unable to critically evaluate its present.



Image: a black man "looting;" white people "finding." (Click on the image above for a larger view.)


Post script: The Onion offers a humorous take on some of the concerns I've addressed here, including issues of race, in a spoof, "God Outdoes Terrorists Yet Again."

News reports today indicate that Cuba has offered to send 1000 doctors to the hurricane stricken region, and that countries such as Bangladesh ($1m), Venezuela ($1m to the Red Cross), Djibouti ($50k), Azerbaijan ($500k) and Gabon ($500k) are offering emergency aid. That's of course to return the favor of US foreign aid largesse, which in terms of percentage of GNP is the lowest of any industrialized nation in the world.

—Lincoln

Katrina: Race Against Class?

The Washington Post's Lynne Duke and Teresa Wiltz's essay, "A Nation's Castaways," addresses many of the most relevant issues of race and class that have marked the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe (the text of the article is also available as a comment on this post). An article from Truthout that also addresses some of these issues, by National Lawyers Guild director Marjorie Cohen, asks how Castro's Cuba was able to cope with a hurricane last year that destroyed some 20,000 homes without suffering even a single loss of life.

Duke and Wiltz gather comments from political figures as disparate as Harvard law professor Lani Guinier and Ward Connerly, a former University of California regent and prominent Affirmative Action opponent, who predictably offer contrary views on the racial and class implications of this disaster. Guinier's comments are most cogent: she points out that impoverished African Americans are "the canary in the mine. Poor black people are the throwaway people. And we pathologize them in order to justify our disregard." Even Connerly admits that the images of looting seen on TV are likely to play into longstanding racial stereotypes: "I thought this is only going to fuel the perception," Connerly laments, that "there those people go again."



Russell Adams, a professor of African American studies at Howard University, claims that "The lesson we can take from this is that the society cannot blithely ignore extreme disparities in economic and social situations." But in order for this to happen, argues Noel Ignatiev, editor of the journal Race Traitor, Americans must surmount the racial divide revealed by the hurricane in favor of a new awareness of shared class interests. "Some [Americans] may be awakening to the notion there's no use clinging to an identity that's doing them no good," says Ignatiev. "If white folks start thinking of themselves as poor and dispossessed instead of privileged, it will change the way they act. We will see the beginnings of class conflict."

Whether or not recognizing shared class interests requires, as Ignatiev suggests, dropping racial affiliations, I share his hopes for the rise of a new class awareness. Ongoing racial prejudice and the demographic-political sequestration that resulted from it may be one of the most basic reasons why the US has never had a labor movement as broad or effective as those in other industrialized nations. The question is whether a single catastrophic event like Hurricane Katrina can bring about a real political transformation in which people learn to work together for a more egalitarian society.

—Lincoln

Katrina, Race, and Class: Part II

A number of major media news articles and television reports have started to appear that directly address race and class issues as inextricable components of this disaster. Among these are David Gonzalez's excellent report in the New York Times, "From Margins of Society to Center of the Tragedy," Reuters' article on the comments of rapper Kanye West during a live NBC-sponsored benefit for the victims of the hurricane, Aaron Kiney's helpful "'Looting' or 'Finding,'" on Salon, which discusses the disparate captioning of photos of blacks and whites in post-hurricane New Orleans, Jack Shafer's comment on Slate about the reticence of the news media to mention race and class explicitly, and others that have since appeared elsewhere (reprinted versions of some of these articles are available as comments on this post).

Alan Wolfe, author of Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It, in an opinion piece also available on Salon (and reprinted as a comment on this blog entry), tries to sum up the contrasting political views of what has happened since New Orleans descended into chaos. He presents the competing attitudes of conservatives and liberals towards acts of "looting" as part of a broader "culture war" in the United States — a war that he ultimately deems trivial compared to the advancements (and, more pointedly, the fragility) of our civilization itself. Civilization's shocking tenuousness, he argues, is what becomes most clearly revealed by catastrophes such as that created by Hurricane Katrina.

Wolfe commits the blunder, to my mind, of focusing so much on his concern for civilizational durability that he problematically underplays the critical contextual issues we Americans, and especially our leaders, must face in the aftermath this debacle. His concluding comment is striking because it so fully shunts aside the deeply local and specific political contexts of this tragedy in favor of meta-discourse on the universal benefits of (presumably Western) civilization:

Some worry that the events unleashed in the aftermath of Katrina will inflame the American culture war. If only we could be so lucky. Our culture war is puny when compared with Hobbes' war of all against all. As we watch the tragedy of Katrina unfold, we are not talking about relatively insignificant matters such as who should marry whom. We are talking about civilization itself, why its invention has been humanity's greatest accomplishment and why we should do everything in our power to protect it. That we have so many people in our midst, including in the seats of power in Washington, who cannot understand what an improvement society is over nature is a tragedy fully as destructive as Katrina's. And when the totality of that tragedy is reckoned, it may cause more death and destruction than nature is capable of doing.

Where, in his conclusion, is there any room for an analysis of the effects of economic disparities that have so exacerbated this catastrophe? Must we not think about why it is that our society, despite its technological and political advances, is so extremely economically unequal and why it still remains divided by what W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903 called "the problem of the color line"? Such issues are not merely, as Wolfe blithely argues, the "relatively insignificant matters such as who should marry whom" (although that kind of question may have much to do with the reasons that economic disparities in this country remain so ingrained). The problems of social and economic inequity exposed by Hurricane Katrina's deadly winds are what have transformed a natural catastrophe into a cultural tragedy — and also, perhaps, an opportunity for broad cultural self-reflection. In the end, Wolfe's views seem to shut down the kind of careful thinking that this national experience ought instead to provoke for all of us. The "culture war" that he trivializes is precisely the kind of political contestation that badly needs to take place as soon as the victims of Katrina are safe, dry, and well fed.

—Lincoln

Hurricane Katrina, Race, and Class: Part I

I have been in Pensacola, Florida since late-Tuesday because my house in Mobile still is without electricity. I'm doing okay here, but I look forward to getting back home as soon as electricity is restored. The University is supposed to reopen on September 6th, but that may change, depending on conditions. Yesterday and today the gas stations here in Pensacola were mainly without gas, and I waited in a long line at the one station that (only briefly) had gas to offer. It's scary to see people begin to panic when basic commodities are in short supply; I can only imagine to what degree such a sense of panic must be magnified nearer to the epicenter, where essential necessities such as water, food, and sanitation are in severe shortage.

From my vantage — geographically and emotionally near the disaster, but safely buffered from its worst deprivations — much of the press coverage has not adequately dealt with the most difficult social issues that mark this still unfolding catastrophe. It is difficult to avoid concluding that one important cause of the slow response to the debacle has to do with the fact that most of the people who are caught up in it are poor and black. Here in Pensacola I keep hearing blame expressed towards the victims: "they should have heeded the call to evacuate." Even the FEMA chief said as much in a news conference today. So where, I must ask, were the busses he should have provided to take them away before Katrina hit? Where were the troops to supervise evacuation? Where were the emergency shelters and health services? People who ought to know better do not seem to understand or acknowledge the enormous differential in available resources — access to transportation, money, information, social services, etc. — that forms the background to this human catastrophe. Terms such as "looting" are tossed about in the press and on TV with no class or race analysis at all. In recent news reports, there is an emerging discussion of the political background to the calamity: the Bush administration's curtailment of federal funding for levee repair in order to pay for the war in Iraq, rampant commercial housing development on environmentally protective wetlands, financial evisceration of FEMA, and so on. But there's been little or no discussion of the economic background that makes New Orleans a kind of "Third World" nation unto itself, with fearsomely deteriorated housing projects, extraordinarily high crime and murder rates, and one of the worst public education systems in the country.

Major newspaper editors and TV producers have prepared very few reports about issues of race in this disaster, and those reports that have appeared so far seem to me deeply insufficient in their analysis of endemic class and race problems. I've been communicating with a national magazine reporter friend of mine since Tuesday night about the issues of race and class in this catastrophe; here's my email comment on this topic from earlier today:

CNN addressed the race question today on TV, but only to ask softball questions of Jesse Jackson, who to his discredit didn't exhibit even a modicum of the anger of one Louisiana black political leader, who said: "While the Administration has spoken of 'shock and awe' in the war on terror, the response to this disaster has been 'shockingly awful.'"

The Washington Post also ran a puff piece that doesn't ask any of the relevant questions, such as whether the Administration's response would have been faster if these were white people suffering the agonies of a slow motion disaster. Here's the link to the Post's piece.

Michael Moore also had this to say in a letter to President Bush circulated today:

No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing — NOTHING — to do with this!

(See Michael Moore's full letter here.)

A member of the Congressional Black Caucus had to remind reporters today to stop referring to those displaced by the flooding with the blanket term "refugees" (recalling, of course, the waves of Haitian or Central American or Southeast Asian refugees who sought shelter in the US): these people are citizens, she said, deserving of the full protections guaranteed to all Americans.



The federal government promised on Wednesday that those receiving food stamps could get their full allotment at the beginning of September, rather than the usual piecemeal distribution throughout the month. How very generous. What these people need is relief money and access to services now — even the 50,000 or so exhausted and traumatized people whose images we've seen at the N.O. Superdome and at the Civic Center are just a few of the far larger number of those residents of the region displaced by the hurricane, many of whom live from monthly paycheck to paycheck. It will be months at the very least before these people can return home; their jobs may be gone for good. The mayor of New Orleans was actually caught off camera crying in frustration today at the slow pace of the federal response.

If there is a hopeful side to this tragedy, it is perhaps that Hurricane Katrina's damage and efforts to relieve those displaced by the storm may spark a wider national discussion about the ongoing and unaddressed issues of race and economic disparity in America. If that doesn't happen, I fear that there will be even further deterioration in the living conditions and economic predicament of those left destitute and homeless by Katrina — a situation in which our own government's years of neglect must be included as a crucial contributing factor. We must not let such a deterioration of conditions for those hardest hit by Katrina occur.

What happens next, when tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans require long-term recovery help, will be an important barometer of our society's ability to heal itself.

—Lincoln

Hurricane Katrina aftermath (Tuesday afternoon, August 30)

Many thanks to my friends and family for their expressions of concern about me. I am well and my property was not damaged by Hurricane Katrina. The storm yesterday was dramatic, but not really scary. Lots of wind and rain, sounds of explosions (from trees falling or transformers exploding), and a general sense of the raging power of brooding nature unleashed. By the end of the afternoon yesterday I was able to walk around outside in my neighborhood, being careful to avoid flying debris from branches and roofs and whatever else wasn't tied down.

Mobile was quite a scene post-Katrina today, although we in the city (as opposed to the outlying coastal areas of Alabama) saw nothing like the devastation of Mississippi or Louisiana. The TV images of flooding and destruction, and the reports of many deaths, make it sound quite horrific around New Orleans and in the bayou/beach regions. New Orleans wasn't hit as hard as it could have been, but it sounds like the post-hurricane flooding has devastated the city for perhaps months to come. Apparently waters are still rising in downtown N.O. even this afternoon (Tuesday).

My battery-operated radio has been my main source of information over the last day and a half. I appreciate the colloquial and chatty quality of some reports from local stations, which remind me of the days after the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco in 1989. As after that disaster, people have been encouraged to call in to the radio stations to share their personal stories of enduring the storm, of needing help, of witnessing the incredible. Others call in offering rooms for the homeless. On the other hand, I've also had to turn off the radio in disgust at times when stations seemed to exploit stories of personal misery and hardship. There's a very thin line sometimes between crass commercial hype (with unctuous musical punctuation) and helpful information. Insurance companies run repetitive ads about how to get in touch with assessment agents. The reporters are in their element, apparently, with a real disaster to cover.

I drove around Mobile this morning. There were fallen trees, downed power lines and light poles and cell towers, and debris of all kinds everywhere; downtown Mobile had been flooded yesterday, but was drying out today. All of the traffic lights are out, electricity is down just about everywhere, stores are almost universally closed, and people are driving from service station to station looking for gas for their cars or electricity generators. Occasional robberies and looting have been reported. Some bridges and tunnels are closed around town, and the causeway that crosses the Mobile Bay is impassable (I-10 is open, however). A lot of dead birds — pelicans, mainly — litter the Interstate, victims of disorientation or shock, I suppose. Local people are out and about today, cleaning up the mess, assessing damages. I moved big branches from my driveway and yard yesterday while the wind was still blowing, and then I raked up smaller debris (just like after Hurricane Ivan). The scene looks a good deal worse than after Ivan last year, despite our having been much closer to the eye of the earlier storm. I think being on the eastern side of this storm made the wind and rain effects worse for us, even though we were more than a hundred miles from the eye of Katrina.

My electricity is out; that's really the worst of the effects for me — not bad at all compared to nearby areas. Today it's sunny and in the 90s, so my house is sweltering without any air conditioning or fans. Nor do I have refrigeration, so I've been eating what can still be eaten and opening a lot of cans. The power company is saying that we'll be without electricity for days if not weeks, because given the scale of the devastation across the coastal area, repair crews are stretched extremely thin.

I decided to leave Mobile for a day or two. I'm writing this email from a Marriott Extended Stay Hotel lobby in Pensacola. But I'm not spending the night here; there don't seem to be any available hotel rooms in this area, so I may head further eastward this afternoon to look for a motel. I've also brought a tent with me, so I may camp out tonight (which would in any case be more comfortable than staying in my house). I imagine that the University will open up again on Wednesday or Thursday.

Thanks again for your many messages and thoughts. I'll let you know how things go when I can.

—Lincoln